For all we’ve learned in recent years, major questions about the basic facts of this case continue to loom large over this story. Which brings us to a fascinating Substack post by journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez about another under-explored facet of the Epstein scandal. A part of this story directly related to the stunning fact that Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister, Christine Maxwell, co-founded Chiliad, a company offering PROMIS-like database capabilities to the US government in the post‑9/11 period, with the FBI serving as one of Chiliad’s flagship initial clients: It turns out Christine Maxwell’s career in offering software with PROMIS-like capabilities is far more direct than just her founding of Chiliad. was handed day-to-day control of Information on Demand back in 1985, the company led by father, Robert Maxwell, and that sold PROMIS software to US institutions. As we’ve seen, Robert Maxwell played a profound role in the PROMIS affair, having been recruit as a salesman for versions of PROMIS with Israel backdoors built in. And Christine Maxwell was right there for helping to manage this operation, as far back as 1985. It’s the kind of revelation that isn’t just fascinating in the context of the Epstein scandal. It’s also rather revelatory given the fact that Christine went on to co-found a company that was given access to so many of the US government’s most closely held secrets.

As Valdes-Rodriguez also recounts, it was June of 1984 when two Sandia National Laboratories employees approached the FBI’s New Mexico field office about information they received from colleagues at the National Security Agency (NSA) that Information on Demand had acquired an NSA database containing information about methods for tapping government databases. The employees also conveyed that they feared Maxwell was attempting to sell their institution bugged software. The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation. By August of 1984, the DOJ ordered the New Mexico field office to close the investigation. This is, of course, the same DOJ that itself was involved in the original theft of PROMIS from INSLAW. It’s part of what makes the PROMIS affair such a fascinating precursor to the Epstein scandal. In both cases we seemingly have US and Israeli intelligence working together in an operation that remains unexplained to this day. It’s also worth keeping in mind that, while Robert Maxwell was alleged to work for MI6, the Mossad, and even the KGB, one of the coups he managed to pull off in the PROMIS affair was the sale of the software to the Soviets. So if Maxwell really was working with the KGB as has been alleged, and he didn’t warn them about PROMIS’s backdoors in advance, it would appear he was operating in a double agent capacity, which is really what we should expect given the overall context of his life and career.

But Christine Maxwell’s role in the PROMIS affair isn’t the only Epstein-related revelation in the following report that ties in the Epstein affair into the US national security state. Because it also turns out there’s communications tower located at Zorro Ranch set up to run a private communications link between the ranch and Sandia Crest Tower, a critical piece of New Mexico’s communications infrastructure. According to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) records, the Zorro Ranch is the location of two Microwave Industrial/Business Pool licenses, one that carries transmissions to Sandia Crest Tower in the Sandia Mountains and the other carrying transmissions back to the ranch, creating a private bi-direction communications channel operating entirely outside commercial internet infrastructure. Keep in mind that the kind of organizations that normally use this kind of private communication technology include NSA field stations, CIA operational facilities, FBI secure data operations, Department of Defense installations, electric utilities, natural gas pipeline operators, high-frequency trading firms, and major bank data centers. Once transmissions arrive at the Sandia Crest Tower they can be broadcast to virtually anywhere in the world. Why would Zorro Ranch need to communication that discrete?

Keep in mind that if Sandia Crest Tower doesn’t just have private Microwave Industrial/Business Pool connections to the Zorro Ranch. Sandia Crest Tower is a hub for this kind of private communications which presumably means the communications sent there could be privately routed to a range of other entities. Which brings us to the fact that Zorro Ranch is a neighbor of some major national security research institutes including Los Alamos National Laboratory, and, of course, Sandia National Laboratories. In fact, it turns out Zorro Ranch is at a geographic midpoint between those to entities, which only adds to the speculation of who Epstein was communicating with.

The pair of licenses were granted on July 12, 2016 and expire on July 12, 2026, in just a few months, and remain active. Yes, Epstein’s alleged death, and subsequent sale of the Zorro Ranch property, somehow didn’t end up with a loss of those licenses.

The following piece also goes on to speculate about a possible Russian angle to the Epstein affair. It’s not exactly a compelling argument, but some of the details laid out are still noteworthy. The speculation focuses on the fact that Karyna Shuliak — the Belarussian woman described as Epstein’s girlfriend and who ended up as one of primary beneficiaries of Epstein’s estate and who was the last known person Epstein spoke with the day before his ‘suicide’ — happened to be in Russia on the day Epstein’s body was discovered. The fact that she was in Russia isn’t particularly shocking or informative in and of itself. After all, the notion that Epstein was running a Russian influence operation all these decades flies in the face of the incredible kid-glove treatment he kept getting from US authorities, including the fact that the Epstein estate was left with potentially over $100 million in assets after federal prosecutors decided to not pursue the remaining assets on behalf of the victims.

But some of the other details about Shuliak are quite notable like the fact that Shuliak worked for Southern Trust Company, the financial entity with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets at the time of Epstein’s death. Recall how, as we’ve learned through the many interviews with Ed Opperman, Southern Trust appears to be the financial entity that somehow came into hundreds of millions of dollars in assets in the wake of the Towers Financial ponzi scheme that Epstein somehow managed to evade any culpability over despite being a central player. That Shuliak worked for Southern Trust and ultimately ended up a beneficiary of Epstein’s estate suggests she was extremely important in the financial side of Epstein’s operations. Recall how Epstein’s final phone call at the jail before his ‘suicide’ was ostensibly to his mother — long dead at that point- but was in reality to Shulia. Epstein was even allowed to use a phone for that call to Shuliak that is normally reserved for discussions with attorneys and therefore aren’t monitored by the prison. And let’s not forget that the will that has been guiding the disbursement of the estate’s remaining assets was created just days before his alleged ‘suicide’ and requires the estate to follow a trust Epstein set up, the 1953 Trust, that remains a secret. Shuliak appears to be the person tapped to continue at least some aspect of the Epstein operation in one form or another.

Another very interesting part of Shuliak’s biography is the fact that she was apparently in a five year sham marriage to Jennifer Kalin, an Epstein victim who also happened to be an ex-girlfriend of Kimball Musk, brother of Elon Musk, to facilitate Shuliak getting her US citizenship. It’s one of the many details in this story involving the Musk family. Recall how journalist James B. Stewart recounted hearing during an ‘off the record’ interview of Epstein in 2018 that Elon Musk was consulting with Epstein about possible replacements for the role of CEO of Tesla. That Kimball Musk’s ex-girlfriend spent five years in a sham marriage with Shuliak suggests the ties between Epstein and the Musks are far more extensive that generally recognized.

Another ostensibly suspicious Russian tie-in to the Epstein story cited below involves Don and Mary Catherine Huffines, the MAGA-connected Texas couple who secretly purchased Zorro Ranch in 2023. It turns out both Don, Mary Catherine, and Don’s twin brother all joined a delegation led by Senator Rand Paul during a June 2018 trip to Russia. The trip was not publicized by the Huffines, who characterized it as an attempt to confront Russian officials about election interference, with Rand Paul apparently delivering a letter from President Trump to Vladimir Putin. There’s plenty of very interest associations of the Huffines, but it’s hard to see that trip to Russia as some kind of smoking gun.

Intriguingly, as we’re going to see, Epstein had a Russian business visa issued in June of 2018. We don’t know if it was issue before or after the Paul delegation’s trip to Russia that month, but the fact the trip was over by August 6, 2018, suggests the visa was likely issued after the trip. Did the Huffines or someone else from the Paul delegation lobby the Russian government on Epstein’s behalf?

And those questions about how Epstein got that June 2018 Russian visa brings us to another Russian tangent to the Epstein story: Sergei Belyakov, ca graduate of the FSB Academy and the man who ran the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Belyakov met with Epstein at least five times. We are told Belyakov apparently helped Epstein obtain Russian visas.

We are also told Belyakov used Epstein to arrange meetings with Peter Thiel and Thomas Pritzker, and, in return, Epstein attempted to facilitate a meeting between Belyakov and Putin. There’s no explanation for how Epstein could possibly play a role in facilitating a meeting between Belyakov and Putin or the veracity of these claims. But as we’re going to see, Epstein write in a 2013 email to Ehud Barak that, “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference I told him no.” There’s no evidence such a meeting ever took place, but such tales of claims by Epstein suggest that Epstein had probably been hyping alleged ties to Putin for years.

Note how we also aren’t told that such a meeting between Belyakov and Putin ever happened. Which makes this is a good time to recall the apparent role Sergei Belyakov and the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum may have played in another bizarre episode involving a mysterious intelligence-connected figure who made all sorts of questionable claims about access to the Kremlin: the case of Felix Sater, the mysterious Russian immigrant with ties to the Russian mafia who has past as both an FBI and CIA contract agent who was a central player in the 2016 ‘Ukrainian peace plan’ fiasco with the Right Sector-connected Ukrainian politician Andrii Artemenko. As we saw, back in 2015 and 2016, Trump was still trying to work out some sort of ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ deal that would require permission from the Kremlin. In June of 2016, Sater approaches Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, with an offer for Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, with Sater suggesting that he could arrange for Cohen to meet with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders, and maybe even Putin. We were also told that Sater even presented Cohen with a formal invitation to the conference from the Russian leader of the event, who was presumably Belyakov. In other words, it’s possible Belyakov was playing a role in Felix Sater’s still-under-explored maneuverings with the Trump campaign in 2016. As we’re going to see, Belyakov repeated tried to get Epstein to arrange for high profile US guests to the forum, which is consistent with him working with Felix Sater to recruit Michael Cohen as an attendee. Epstein and Belyakov have plenty to quid pro quo options available between the two of them.

Another interesting activity between Belyakov is and Epstein is a request Epstein had of Belyakov to investigate a Russian woman who was attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessmen in New York. We have no idea of this woman was one of Epstein’s victims or not, but it’s the kind of request by Epstein that suggests his putative role as ‘blackmail-in-chief’ may have involved the deployment of that skill set to protect powerful figures from blackmail. And, more generally, we have to ask how often Epstein and his co-conspirators had to deal with threats of blackmail from their many victims? How were these situations handled? This is a good time to recall the allegations of bodies buried on the Zorro Ranch property.

It’s that constellation of remarkable facts laid out in Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s recent Substack piece. Facts that strongly point towards some sort of intelligence-related relationship to the US by the Maxwell family going to the PROMIS scandal of the 1980s that happened to directly involve Christine Maxwell before she went on to offer PROMIS-like services to the post‑9/11 US national security state. And facts that don’t really point towards a Russian government role in the Epstein affair but instead a Russian-related chapter to this broader story. And then there’s the June 2018 visa issued to Epstein the same month as the Rand Paul delegation to Moscow where the Huffines tagged along. Epstein definitely had an interest in Russia, but the pedigree of his operation all points towards an operation that has been operating with high level US state protection for decades. And is potentially still operating with that protection as the Epstein estate continues to chug along, including the private communications to someone via the Sandia Crest Tower. It’s all a reminder of the remarkable parallels between the PROMIS scandal and the Epstein affair: in both cases, the more we learn, the more sordid it all gets. But all the more apparent that it becomes that we’re never going to be allowed to really know what happened:

Alisa Writes Substack

Ghislaine Maxwell’s Father Sold Bugged Israeli Software to Two Nuclear Weapons Labs in New Mexico. Then His Daughter Led Jeffrey Epstein to Purchase a Ranch Located Halfway Between Them.

A federal paper trail connects Robert Maxwell’s bugged software at Sandia to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, the Huffines family’s secret Moscow meeting, and a son in the Trump White House.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Mar 26, 2026

In 1985, a British media mogul walked into Sandia National Laboratories — one of the most sensitive nuclear weapons facilities in the United States — and signed a contract to install surveillance software that federal investigators would later allege was engineered to spy on its own users.

In 1993, a convicted sex offender purchased a ranch at the precise geographic midpoint between that facility and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the other crown jewel of American nuclear weapons research. He equipped that ranch with an industrial-sized spy-grade private microwave communications link running directly to a relay tower at Sandia Crest.

In 2023, a Texas family with documented ties to Russian officials and the Trump White House purchased that ranch, terminated most of its federal communications licenses — but kept the microwave link to Sandia Crest running, in the dead man’s company name.

The British media mogul was Robert Maxwell. His daughter is Ghislaine Maxwell. The sex offender was Jeffrey Epstein. The Texas family is Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines.

These documented facts are all drawn from federal court records, FCC license filings, FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the Epstein files, congressional testimony, published investigative reporting, and this reporter’s own review of primary sources.

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I. The Software

PROMIS — the Prosecutor’s Management Information System — was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Inslaw Inc., a small Washington, D.C. software firm. Its founder, William Hamilton, built something genuinely revolutionary: a program that could simultaneously query and integrate information from multiple, incompatible databases without requiring each system to be reprogrammed. In an era before the internet, before cloud computing, it was a surveillance tool of extraordinary potential.

The Department of Justice licensed PROMIS for use in U.S. attorneys’ offices nationwide. Then, according to court findings and congressional investigators, it stole it. A federal bankruptcy court found that the DOJ had obtained enhanced versions of PROMIS through what it called ‘trickery, fraud and deceit.’ The 1992 House Judiciary Committee report confirmed significant irregularities in the government’s handling of the software.

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According to FBI counterintelligence records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Hamilton and reported in detail by the investigative news organization MuckRock, Israeli intelligence — specifically the Mossad, under veteran operations chief Rafi Eitan — recognized PROMIS’s potential as a global surveillance weapon. Eitan’s alleged plan: modify the stolen software with a hidden backdoor, then sell the compromised version to intelligence agencies and institutions worldwide. Every installation would quietly funnel data back to Israel, without the buyer ever knowing.

Eitan was not an obscure figure. He was a senior Mossad operations chief who, during the same period, was also running Jonathan Pollard — the U.S. Navy intelligence analyst later convicted of passing American nuclear secrets to Israel. His alleged role in the PROMIS operation has been identified consistently across multiple independent investigations spanning three decades, including by former Israeli Military Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, and by journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon in their extensively sourced 2002 account, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy.

The 1994 DOJ review of the INSLAW matter explicitly rejected some of the most sweeping espionage allegations, finding “no credible basis” for certain claims. That review affirmed the findings of a special counsel appointed by Attorney General William Barr — the same William Barr whose father, former OSS officer inexplicably turned Dalton School headmaster Donald Barr, hired Jeffrey Epstein as a teacher in 1974. The same Bill Barr who would later serve as Trump’s Attorney General overseeing the federal facility where Epstein died in 2019. The same Bill Barr who, as I write this, is a private attorney whose secret legal doctrines — written during his first tenure as Attorney General — are currently being used by the Trump administration to justify the extraordinary rendition of foreign leaders, including Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Critics have noted that the 1994 DOJ review of the INSLAW matter was conducted by the same Justice Department implicated in the original theft of PROMIS from Inslaw. Readers should weigh that context.

What the FBI’s own records confirm is this: the New Mexico field office opened a counterintelligence investigation into an attempt to sell PROMIS to Sandia National Laboratories. And that investigation was shut down by Main Justice before it could conclude.

II. The Salesman

Robert Maxwell was born Jan Ludvik Hoch in 1923 in Carpathian Ruthenia — then part of newly formed Czechoslovakia, now part of Ukraine — the youngest son of a poor Yiddish-speaking Jewish family. He escaped the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, joined the Czechoslovak army in exile, and fought with British forces across Europe. Field Marshal Montgomery decorated him personally. By war’s end he had changed his name five times and spoke at least eight languages.

After the war Maxwell worked in the British Foreign Office’s press division in occupied Berlin — placing him at the intersection of Allied intelligence networks at exactly the moment the OSS was becoming the CIA. British Foreign Office files, partially declassified in subsequent decades, described his ‘questionable activities’ as having been brought to the Office’s attention on multiple occasions. The files labeled him ‘a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.’ His daughter Ghislaine would later tell the FBI in a deposition that her father was an intelligence asset for the British “and others.”

By the 1980s Robert Maxwell had built one of the world’s largest publishing empires — Pergamon Press, Mirror Group Newspapers, Macmillan Inc. He was a Labour Member of Parliament and a friend of world leaders. He was also, according to Ben-Menashe and the investigative record compiled by Thomas and Dillon, a Mossad asset tasked with selling the backdoored PROMIS software to governments and institutions worldwide. According to those accounts, he ultimately brokered PROMIS installations worth over $500 million to intelligence agencies in more than twenty countries — including the KGB and agencies across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

His biggest target, however, was the United States itself.

III. New Mexico, 1984

Sandia National Laboratories sits on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is one of three Department of Energy nuclear research facilities, responsible for the non-nuclear components of American nuclear weapons — the triggering systems, the delivery mechanisms, the engineering that makes a warhead function. Los Alamos National Laboratory, roughly ninety miles northwest, is where the weapons themselves are designed, and where J. Robert Oppenheimer’s team created the world’s first atomic bomb. Together, these two New Mexico facilities represent the operational core of the American nuclear arsenal.

In 1984, Maxwell — operating through a U.S.-based company called Information on Demand, which his Pergamon publishing empire had quietly acquired — targeted both facilities for PROMIS sales. According to Thomas and Dillon’s sourced account, Maxwell sought out Senator John Tower of Texas, then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, paying him $200,000 for introductions to Sandia and access to the Reagan White House. That allegation has not been confirmed in primary documents available to the public and should be understood as credibly alleged.

What is documented in FBI records: in June 1984, two Sandia employees who worked in technology transfer approached the FBI’s New Mexico field office. They had received alarming information from colleagues at the National Security Agency — that Maxwell’s company had acquired an NSA database containing information about methods for tapping government databases. They believed Maxwell was attempting to sell their institution something engineered to spy on it.

The FBI opened a formal counterintelligence investigation. Two months later, one of the Sandia employees followed up with the Bureau, urging the FBI and NSA to investigate jointly. According to MuckRock’s analysis of the FOIA records, the Sandia employee was essentially stonewalled and told to take concerns to FBI headquarters.

In August 1984, FBI headquarters — operating under Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Department of Justice, the same DOJ implicated in the original PROMIS theft from Inslaw — ordered the New Mexico field office to close the investigation.

The investigation was closed. Maxwell returned to Sandia. In February 1985, he signed the contract for the PROMIS installation, listing himself as President and CEO of Information on Demand. Shortly afterward, he transferred day-to-day control of the company to his daughter Christine Maxwell, who served as its president and CEO until her father’s death in 1991.

MuckRock’s subsequent analysis found that Robert Maxwell’s FBI file has grown progressively more classified over time — more heavily redacted in 2013 than in 1994, and more heavily redacted still in 2017. This is the inverse of what normally happens with aging intelligence files.

IV. The Triangle

Pull up a map of central New Mexico.

[see map of central New Mexico]

Sandia National Laboratories sits in Albuquerque, in the Rio Grande valley. Los Alamos National Laboratory sits on a mesa to the north, in the Jemez Mountains. To the east, between them, slightly closer to Albuquerque, you arrive where Jeffrey Epstein built Zorro Ranch. (Now called San Rafael Ranch.)

Epstein purchased the 7,600-acre property in 1993 for a reported $12.3 million, according to the Albuquerque Journal. He bought it from Bruce King — the longest-serving governor in New Mexico history, whose three terms in office (1971–1975, 1979–1983, and 1991–1995) bracketed the entire PROMIS operation on both ends. King was governor of New Mexico when Maxwell was targeting Sandia. The King family’s land surrounds the Zorro Ranch property. Members of the King family appear in Epstein’s personal address book. Epstein donated money to Gary King — Bruce King’s son, who served as New Mexico Attorney General from 2007 to 2015, the period during which his office had jurisdiction over potential state-level crimes at Zorro Ranch.

The connection between Bruce King’s administration and the federal intelligence activity occurring within his state has never been publicly examined. His papers are archived at the UNM School of Law and are open to public researchers, but by appointment only. My appointment is coming soon.

What has now been documented, through my review of Federal Communications Commission records, is something that reframes the ranch’s relationship to Sandia National Laboratories (and possibly Los Alamos National Labs) entirely.

FCC records show that Zorro Development Corp., registered at 49 Zorro Ranch Road, Stanley, New Mexico, holds two active Microwave Industrial/Business Pool licenses — call signs WQXY316 and WQXY300, both granted July 12, 2016, both expiring July 12, 2026. License WQXY316 carries transmissions from the Zorro Ranch main residence to Sandia Crest Tower in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque. License WQXY300 carries transmissions from Sandia Crest Tower back to Zorro Ranch. Together they constitute a permanent, fixed, bidirectional private microwave communications link — a dedicated two-way data channel operating entirely outside commercial internet infrastructure, through channels where traffic cannot be monitored, intercepted, or logged by third parties.

The Sandia Crest end of the system is anchored by a lattice tower standing 45.7 meters tall. Sandia Crest Tower is one of the most significant communications relay points in New Mexico. Data reaching Sandia Crest from Zorro Ranch can be routed onward through that infrastructure to virtually any destination in the world.

To understand the significance of this infrastructure, consider who actually uses Industrial/Business Pool microwave systems: NSA field stations, CIA operational facilities, FBI secure data operations, Department of Defense installations, electric utilities, natural gas pipeline operators, high-frequency trading firms, and major bank data centers. None of those descriptions apply to a private vacation ranch in the high desert.

Robert Maxwell sold backdoored surveillance software to Sandia National Laboratories in 1985. A decade later, his daughter’s partner built a private off-network communications link from the geographic midpoint between Sandia and Los Alamos directly to a tower at Sandia Crest. The surveillance infrastructure Maxwell embedded in Sandia, and the communications infrastructure Epstein built toward it, are connected by geography, by the Sandia Crest relay point, and by the decade-long relationship between Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein himself.

But why? And to whom was Epstein privately sending so much data from his remote outpost between two of the United States’ top nuclear weapons labs?

V. The Heir

On August 10, 2019, the day Jeffrey Epstein died in a Manhattan federal detention facility, his last known phone call was to Karyna Shuliak — a Belarusian-born dental surgeon whom Epstein had designated as the primary beneficiary of his estate two days before his death.

That day, according to FBI text messages now in the public record — document EFTA01227447, a 289-page FBI text chain — Shuliak was in Russia. Federal prosecutors, the document shows, were aware of this. They asked her attorney to arrange a conversation about the final phone call and her relationship with Epstein. As far as the public record shows, that conversation never took place. Shuliak has never been charged with any crime.

Shuliak’s background warrants scrutiny. She was introduced to Epstein in 2009, almost immediately after his release from prison in Florida, through an unnamed Russian woman described as a mutual friend. She met him for the first time in Minsk, her hometown. Epstein coached her to pose as a domestic worker to enter the United States. He later instructed her to form a sham marriage with Jennifer Kalin, a former Epstein survivor and ex-girlfriend of Elon Musk’s brother, Kimball. The marriage lasted five years, long enough for Shuliak to gain her U.S. citizenship. Epstein also donated a massive amount of money to get Columbia University to accept Shuliak to its dental surgery program after it initially rejected her application. The bribe worked. She graduated in 2015.

Shuliak also worked for Southern Trust Company, Epstein’s U.S. Virgin Islands entity that processed $184 million through Deutsche Bank between 2013 and 2019 — described in court filings as a conduit for payments to young foreign women.

Shuliak inherited Epstein’s estate, including Zorro Ranch, upon his death. She subsequently sold Little Saint James — Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands — for $60 million to Stephen Deckoff, billionaire founder of Black Diamond Capital Management. Her dental practice is currently located at 6100 Red Hook Quarters, St. Thomas, in the same geographic area.

VI. The New Owners

In 2023, Zorro Ranch was purchased from Epstein’s estate by San Rafael Ranch LLC, a limited liability company whose beneficial owners were subsequently identified as Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines of Dallas, Texas. The Huffines family had initially attempted to remain anonymous in the transaction, but were outed by Clara Bates, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, this year.

The Huffines family terminated several FCC licenses on the property in 2024 and 2026. They did not terminate the microwave link to Sandia Crest. As of the date of publication, FCC records show those two licenses — WQXY316 and WQXY300 — remain active, held in the name of Zorro Development Corp., Jeffrey Epstein’s former LLC, at 49 Zorro Ranch Road. This is likely not a mere oversight, as they did terminate three other FCC licenses. The curious piece is why they’ve left the two remaining licenses in the name of the late Epstein’s company rather than transferring them to their own.

Donald Huffines is a former Texas state senator currently running for Texas state comptroller with an endorsement from Donald Trump. His son Russell Huffines is currently the Associate Director of Agency Outreach in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs under President Donald Trump, according to LegiStorm and the White House’s own annual report to Congress on staff. Another son, Colin Huffines, was listed in LLC filings as managing the ranch property.

The Huffines family’s connections to Russia are documented. In June 2018, Donald Huffines and his twin brother Phillip traveled to Moscow as part of a delegation led by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. The trip was not publicized by either Huffines brother. It became public only after Russian state media released photographs and wire reports from the meeting. Donald Huffines’ spokesman subsequently stated the trip was intended to confront Russian officials about election interference. The meeting included discussions with Sergei Kislyak, the former Russian Ambassador to the United States whose contacts with Trump campaign officials were a central subject of the Mueller investigation.

According to NBC News reporting on the delegation, Rand Paul carried a handwritten letter from President Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian officials at the meeting advocated for the release of Maria Butina, the Russian national who had infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party and was subsequently convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent.

Mary Catherine Huffines was also present at that Moscow meeting, according to photographs published by Russian media — her presence there, like her husband’s, was not previously disclosed.

The Huffines family also heads HEST Investments, which finances Secretome Therapeutics, a biotech company whose chief product is developed from neonatal cardiac cells harvested from newborns within thirty days of birth. Epstein had publicly stated for years his intention to use Zorro Ranch specifically to impregnate women with his DNA — what he called seeding the human race. Southern Trust Company, the Epstein entity where Shuliak worked, filed documents disclosing it was engaged in DNA analysis. Epstein’s plan to use the ranch for what he described as a human breeding program was not a secret; he discussed it with scientists and associates and it was reported by the New York Times.

VII. The Russian Thread

Epstein’s own connections to Russian intelligence infrastructure are documented in the federal files. Sergei Belyakov — a graduate of the FSB Academy, which trains Russian intelligence officers, and the man who ran Putin’s flagship St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — met with Epstein at least five times. Epstein referred to him in correspondence as ‘my very good friend.’ According to the files, Belyakov helped Epstein obtain Russian visas, gathered intelligence on a woman Epstein claimed was attempting to blackmail American businessmen, and used Epstein to arrange meetings with American billionaires Peter Thiel and Thomas Pritzker. In return, Epstein attempted to facilitate a meeting between Belyakov and Putin.

In June 2018 — the same summer Epstein was emailing former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland to suggest that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov could benefit from speaking with him — Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines were in Moscow, in a meeting with Kislyak, as part of Rand Paul’s delegation carrying Trump’s letter to Putin.

The chronology is as follows: Robert Maxwell, alleged Mossad and multi-agency intelligence asset, penetrated Sandia National Laboratories with surveillance software in 1985. His daughter Ghislaine became Jeffrey Epstein’s operational partner in the 1990s, after Robert’s mysterious death in 1991. Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch — positioned near the midpoint between Sandia and Los Alamos — from the governor of New Mexico, built a private microwave communications link to Sandia Crest, and operated the ranch as a hub of what federal prosecutors described as an international sex trafficking and blackmail network for nearly three decades. Upon Epstein’s death, his estate — including Zorro Ranch — passed to Karyna Shuliak, a Belarusian national introduced to Epstein through Russian contacts, who was in Russia the day he died. The ranch was subsequently sold to a Texas family whose documented Russian contacts include a secret Moscow meeting with sanctioned officials, whose son sits in the Trump White House, and who has kept Epstein’s private microwave link to Sandia Crest running in Epstein’s company name.

Each of these facts is individually documented. Their sequence is a matter of public record. The question of whether they constitute a continuous intelligence operation, or a series of unrelated coincidences, is one that law enforcement, congressional investigators, and the New Mexico Legislature’s newly formed Epstein Truth Commission are now positioned to examine.

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VIII. What Has and Hasn’t Been Investigated

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened the state’s investigation of Zorro Ranch in February 2026, citing ‘revelations outlined in the previously sealed FBI files’ as warranting further examination. The state’s initial investigation had been closed in 2019 at the explicit request of federal prosecutors in New York — the same year Epstein died. On March 8, 2026, state investigators began a physical search of the property, the first such search in the ranch’s history despite decades of survivor allegations.

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No New Mexico news outlet has reported the connection between Robert Maxwell’s 1985 PROMIS sale to Sandia and Jeffrey Epstein’s subsequent establishment of Zorro Ranch at the geographic midpoint between Sandia and Los Alamos. No New Mexico outlet has reported that the private microwave communications link Epstein built between Zorro Ranch and Sandia Crest Tower remains active under the Huffines ownership, in Epstein’s LLC name. No New Mexico outlet has connected the Huffines family’s documented Moscow meeting — including Mary Catherine Huffines’ previously unreported presence — to their purchase of the ranch and their maintenance of its intelligence-grade communications infrastructure.

The Bruce King Papers, covering his three gubernatorial terms including the 1979–1983 term during which Maxwell was targeting Sandia, are archived at the UNM School of Law and are open to public researchers. They have not, to this reporter’s knowledge, been examined in connection with any of the above.

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“Ghislaine Maxwell’s Father Sold Bugged Israeli Software to Two Nuclear Weapons Labs in New Mexico. Then His Daughter Led Jeffrey Epstein to Purchase a Ranch Located Halfway Between Them.” by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez; Alisa Writes Substack; 03/26/2026

“After the war Maxwell worked in the British Foreign Office’s press division in occupied Berlin — placing him at the intersection of Allied intelligence networks at exactly the moment the OSS was becoming the CIA. British Foreign Office files, partially declassified in subsequent decades, described his ‘questionable activities’ as having been brought to the Office’s attention on multiple occasions. The files labeled him ‘a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.’ His daughter Ghislaine would later tell the FBI in a deposition that her father was an intelligence asset for the British “and others.””

The more we learn, the worse it gets. But also the more intriguing it gets. Chislaine Maxwell wasn’t some random individual who fell into Epstein’s orbit. She’s the daughter of Robert Maxwell, long suspected of being an intelligence asset for Britain “and others”, presumably a reference that includes Israel. It’s a fascinating pedigree for the woman who ended up managing an apparent multi-national intelligence operation that has long looked to be managed by the US and Israel and, possibly, “others”. Recall how the 2019 raid on Epstein’s safe revealed a fake passport issued in the early 1980s apparently by the government of Austria listing his residence as Saudi Arabia. Who the hell knows how many “other” governments were partaking in this Epstein/Maxwell operation over the decades it was active. But it’s not just Robert Maxwell’s status as an multi-national spy that makes him such an intriguing father for Ghislaine. There’s the reality that Robert Maxwell was allegedly tasked with selling compromised versions of PROMIS software with backdoors installed to governments and institutions around the world, ultimately brokering more than $500 million in PROMIS contracts to intelligence agencies in more than twenty countries. Robert Maxwell was apparently one of the key players in one of the biggest intelligence scandals/operations of the late 20th century. A scandal global in scope, with US institutions as one of the primary targets. Fascinating, while the compromised PROMIS software was apparently feeding information back to Israel, this whole operation seemingly started with the illegal theft of PROMIS from INSLAW by the US DOJ. So when we see how compromised versions of PROMIS that fed information back to Israel were being peddled by Robert Maxwell to governments around the world, it’s important to keep in mind the corrupt role of the DOJ in all this and Israel’s long-standing role as a US intelligence proxy:

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PROMIS — the Prosecutor’s Management Information System — was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Inslaw Inc., a small Washington, D.C. software firm. Its founder, William Hamilton, built something genuinely revolutionary: a program that could simultaneously query and integrate information from multiple, incompatible databases without requiring each system to be reprogrammed. In an era before the internet, before cloud computing, it was a surveillance tool of extraordinary potential.

The Department of Justice licensed PROMIS for use in U.S. attorneys’ offices nationwide. Then, according to court findings and congressional investigators, it stole it. A federal bankruptcy court found that the DOJ had obtained enhanced versions of PROMIS through what it called ‘trickery, fraud and deceit.’ The 1992 House Judiciary Committee report confirmed significant irregularities in the government’s handling of the software.

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According to FBI counterintelligence records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Hamilton and reported in detail by the investigative news organization MuckRock, Israeli intelligence — specifically the Mossad, under veteran operations chief Rafi Eitan — recognized PROMIS’s potential as a global surveillance weapon. Eitan’s alleged plan: modify the stolen software with a hidden backdoor, then sell the compromised version to intelligence agencies and institutions worldwide. Every installation would quietly funnel data back to Israel, without the buyer ever knowing.

Eitan was not an obscure figure. He was a senior Mossad operations chief who, during the same period, was also running Jonathan Pollard — the U.S. Navy intelligence analyst later convicted of passing American nuclear secrets to Israel. His alleged role in the PROMIS operation has been identified consistently across multiple independent investigations spanning three decades, including by former Israeli Military Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, and by journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon in their extensively sourced 2002 account, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy.

...

By the 1980s Robert Maxwell had built one of the world’s largest publishing empires — Pergamon Press, Mirror Group Newspapers, Macmillan Inc. He was a Labour Member of Parliament and a friend of world leaders. He was also, according to Ben-Menashe and the investigative record compiled by Thomas and Dillon, a Mossad asset tasked with selling the backdoored PROMIS software to governments and institutions worldwide. According to those accounts, he ultimately brokered PROMIS installations worth over $500 million to intelligence agencies in more than twenty countries — including the KGB and agencies across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

His biggest target, however, was the United States itself.
...

And as we can see with the corrupt role Bill Barr played in burying the DOJ’s review of the PROMIS scandal in 1994, the closure of that DOJ review included a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI’s New Mexico field office into an attempt to sell PROMIS to Sandia National Laboratories. The investigation was shut down by Main Justiced before it could conclude. Which sure sounds like what we might expect if indeed PROMIS had been successfully sold to Sandia National Laboratories and the leadership of the DOJ wanted to keep all that covered up. Alarmingly, it appears that 1994 DOJ review of the INSLAW/PROMIS affair happened a decade after the FBI shut down the investigation after two Sandia employees first approached the FBI about Maxwell’s overtures in 1984, the same period when the DOJ itself is implicated in the theft of the PROMIS software. In 1985, Sandia signed the contract with PROMIS. That same year, Robert Maxwell transferred day-to-day control of his company, Information on Demand, to his daughter Christine Maxwell, the same daughter who went on to co-founded Chiliad in the late 1990s, a company offering PROMIS-like abilities to the post‑9/11 US national security state, with the FBI serving as one of the company’s showcase clients. So in 1985, Christine Maxwell was made the head of day-to-day operations for the company that was selling PROMIS software to key US agencies and institutions, including facilities where nuclear weapons development was taking place:

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The 1994 DOJ review of the INSLAW matter explicitly rejected some of the most sweeping espionage allegations, finding “no credible basis” for certain claims. That review affirmed the findings of a special counsel appointed by Attorney General William Barr — the same William Barr whose father, former OSS officer inexplicably turned Dalton School headmaster Donald Barr, hired Jeffrey Epstein as a teacher in 1974. The same Bill Barr who would later serve as Trump’s Attorney General overseeing the federal facility where Epstein died in 2019. The same Bill Barr who, as I write this, is a private attorney whose secret legal doctrines — written during his first tenure as Attorney General — are currently being used by the Trump administration to justify the extraordinary rendition of foreign leaders, including Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Critics have noted that the 1994 DOJ review of the INSLAW matter was conducted by the same Justice Department implicated in the original theft of PROMIS from Inslaw. Readers should weigh that context.

What the FBI’s own records confirm is this: the New Mexico field office opened a counterintelligence investigation into an attempt to sell PROMIS to Sandia National Laboratories. And that investigation was shut down by Main Justice before it could conclude.

...

Sandia National Laboratories sits on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is one of three Department of Energy nuclear research facilities, responsible for the non-nuclear components of American nuclear weapons — the triggering systems, the delivery mechanisms, the engineering that makes a warhead function. Los Alamos National Laboratory, roughly ninety miles northwest, is where the weapons themselves are designed, and where J. Robert Oppenheimer’s team created the world’s first atomic bomb. Together, these two New Mexico facilities represent the operational core of the American nuclear arsenal.

In 1984, Maxwell — operating through a U.S.-based company called Information on Demand, which his Pergamon publishing empire had quietly acquired — targeted both facilities for PROMIS sales. According to Thomas and Dillon’s sourced account, Maxwell sought out Senator John Tower of Texas, then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, paying him $200,000 for introductions to Sandia and access to the Reagan White House. That allegation has not been confirmed in primary documents available to the public and should be understood as credibly alleged.

What is documented in FBI records: in June 1984, two Sandia employees who worked in technology transfer approached the FBI’s New Mexico field office. They had received alarming information from colleagues at the National Security Agency — that Maxwell’s company had acquired an NSA database containing information about methods for tapping government databases. They believed Maxwell was attempting to sell their institution something engineered to spy on it.

The FBI opened a formal counterintelligence investigation. Two months later, one of the Sandia employees followed up with the Bureau, urging the FBI and NSA to investigate jointly. According to MuckRock’s analysis of the FOIA records, the Sandia employee was essentially stonewalled and told to take concerns to FBI headquarters.

In August 1984, FBI headquarters — operating under Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Department of Justice, the same DOJ implicated in the original PROMIS theft from Inslaw — ordered the New Mexico field office to close the investigation.

The investigation was closed. Maxwell returned to Sandia. In February 1985, he signed the contract for the PROMIS installation, listing himself as President and CEO of Information on Demand. Shortly afterward, he transferred day-to-day control of the company to his daughter Christine Maxwell, who served as its president and CEO until her father’s death in 1991.

MuckRock’s subsequent analysis found that Robert Maxwell’s FBI file has grown progressively more classified over time — more heavily redacted in 2013 than in 1994, and more heavily redacted still in 2017. This is the inverse of what normally happens with aging intelligence files.
...

And that remarkable history of Robert and Christine Maxwell’s role in the PROMIS affair and, seemingly, a PROMIS installation at Sandia National Laboratories brings us to the intriguing communications role seemingly played by a pair of active Microwave Industrial/Business Pool licenses carrying transmission from the ranch to and from Sandia Crest Tower, a fixed bidirectional private microwave communications link operating entirely outside commercial internet infrastructure, through channels where traffic cannot be monitored, intercepted, or logged by third parties. Sandia Crest Tower also happens to be one of the most significant communications relay points in New Mexico, with the ability to route communications to virtually anywhere in the world. It’s the kind of communications infrastructure used by NSA field stations, CIA operational facilities, FBI secure data operations, Department of Defense installations, electric utilities, natural gas pipeline operators, high-frequency trading firms, and major bank data centers. And the Zorro Ranch just happened to be directly connected to this. Both licenses granted July 12, 2016, and remain active, for now, with expiration dates of July 12, 2026. Will those licenses get renewed now that the ranch is under new ownership of the Huffines family? We’ll see, but given the Huffines’s close relationship to President Trump, it’s hard to imagine they won’t be very amendable to any special requests from the Trump administration about how to handle these sensitive services:

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Sandia National Laboratories sits in Albuquerque, in the Rio Grande valley. Los Alamos National Laboratory sits on a mesa to the north, in the Jemez Mountains. To the east, between them, slightly closer to Albuquerque, you arrive where Jeffrey Epstein built Zorro Ranch. (Now called San Rafael Ranch.)

Epstein purchased the 7,600-acre property in 1993 for a reported $12.3 million, according to the Albuquerque Journal. He bought it from Bruce King — the longest-serving governor in New Mexico history, whose three terms in office (1971–1975, 1979–1983, and 1991–1995) bracketed the entire PROMIS operation on both ends. King was governor of New Mexico when Maxwell was targeting Sandia. The King family’s land surrounds the Zorro Ranch property. Members of the King family appear in Epstein’s personal address book. Epstein donated money to Gary King — Bruce King’s son, who served as New Mexico Attorney General from 2007 to 2015, the period during which his office had jurisdiction over potential state-level crimes at Zorro Ranch.

The connection between Bruce King’s administration and the federal intelligence activity occurring within his state has never been publicly examined. His papers are archived at the UNM School of Law and are open to public researchers, but by appointment only. My appointment is coming soon.

What has now been documented, through my review of Federal Communications Commission records, is something that reframes the ranch’s relationship to Sandia National Laboratories (and possibly Los Alamos National Labs) entirely.

FCC records show that Zorro Development Corp., registered at 49 Zorro Ranch Road, Stanley, New Mexico, holds two active Microwave Industrial/Business Pool licenses — call signs WQXY316 and WQXY300, both granted July 12, 2016, both expiring July 12, 2026. License WQXY316 carries transmissions from the Zorro Ranch main residence to Sandia Crest Tower in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque. License WQXY300 carries transmissions from Sandia Crest Tower back to Zorro Ranch. Together they constitute a permanent, fixed, bidirectional private microwave communications link — a dedicated two-way data channel operating entirely outside commercial internet infrastructure, through channels where traffic cannot be monitored, intercepted, or logged by third parties.

The Sandia Crest end of the system is anchored by a lattice tower standing 45.7 meters tall. Sandia Crest Tower is one of the most significant communications relay points in New Mexico. Data reaching Sandia Crest from Zorro Ranch can be routed onward through that infrastructure to virtually any destination in the world.

To understand the significance of this infrastructure, consider who actually uses Industrial/Business Pool microwave systems: NSA field stations, CIA operational facilities, FBI secure data operations, Department of Defense installations, electric utilities, natural gas pipeline operators, high-frequency trading firms, and major bank data centers. None of those descriptions apply to a private vacation ranch in the high desert.

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In 2023, Zorro Ranch was purchased from Epstein’s estate by San Rafael Ranch LLC, a limited liability company whose beneficial owners were subsequently identified as Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines of Dallas, Texas. The Huffines family had initially attempted to remain anonymous in the transaction, but were outed by Clara Bates, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, this year.

The Huffines family terminated several FCC licenses on the property in 2024 and 2026. They did not terminate the microwave link to Sandia Crest. As of the date of publication, FCC records show those two licenses — WQXY316 and WQXY300 — remain active, held in the name of Zorro Development Corp., Jeffrey Epstein’s former LLC, at 49 Zorro Ranch Road. This is likely not a mere oversight, as they did terminate three other FCC licenses. The curious piece is why they’ve left the two remaining licenses in the name of the late Epstein’s company rather than transferring them to their own.

Donald Huffines is a former Texas state senator currently running for Texas state comptroller with an endorsement from Donald Trump. His son Russell Huffines is currently the Associate Director of Agency Outreach in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs under President Donald Trump, according to LegiStorm and the White House’s own annual report to Congress on staff. Another son, Colin Huffines, was listed in LLC filings as managing the ranch property.

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The Huffines family also heads HEST Investments, which finances Secretome Therapeutics, a biotech company whose chief product is developed from neonatal cardiac cells harvested from newborns within thirty days of birth. Epstein had publicly stated for years his intention to use Zorro Ranch specifically to impregnate women with his DNA — what he called seeding the human race. Southern Trust Company, the Epstein entity where Shuliak worked, filed documents disclosing it was engaged in DNA analysis. Epstein’s plan to use the ranch for what he described as a human breeding program was not a secret; he discussed it with scientists and associates and it was reported by the New York Times.
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Then there’s fascinating fact that Karyna Shuliak, the woman who is one of the primary beneficiaries of the Epstein estate, appears to have spent five years in a sham marriage with Jennifer Kalin, an ex-girlfiend of Kimball Musk, in order to secure US citizenship. It’s one more data point indicating the Musk family has a still-under-recognized relationship with Epstein. And when we see how Shuliak worked for Southern Trust Company, an entity that processed $184 million through Deutsche Bank between 2013 and 2019, recall how, as we’ve learned through the many interviews with Ed Opperman, how Southern Trust appears to be the financial entity that somehow came into hundreds of millions of dollars in assets in the wake of the Towers Financial ponzi scheme that Epstein somehow managed to evade any culpability over despite being a central player. Also recall how Elon Musk reportedly consulted Epstein back in 2018 about people who could serve as the chairman of Tesla. And recall how Epstein’s final phone call at the jail before his ‘suicide’ was ostensibly to his dead mother but was in reality to Shuliak. Epstein was even allowed to use a phone for that phonecall that is normally reserved for discussions with attorneys and therefore aren’t monitored by the prison. And then there’s the fact that federal prosecutors decided to leave the Epstein estate, and therefore Shuliak, with potentially over $100 million in assets. So when we learn that Shuliak — one of the primary beneficiaries of Epstein’s estate and who ultimately inherited the Zorro Ranch upon Epstein’s apparent death — had spent five years in a sham marriage with an ex-girlfriend of Kimball Musk — brother of a very significant US defense contractor/oligarch — not only is a apparent that the Musk-angle to the Epstein story remains under-explored but it’s also apparent that Karyna Shuliak has long played a key role in the whole Epstein operation. She’s incorporated the property management, financial chicanery, and personal influence operations. Small wonder she’s the person who seems to be ultimately tasked with carrying on aspects of that operation in the post-Epstein era. The big question is who is Shuliak working for at this point:

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V. The Heir

On August 10, 2019, the day Jeffrey Epstein died in a Manhattan federal detention facility, his last known phone call was to Karyna Shuliak — a Belarusian-born dental surgeon whom Epstein had designated as the primary beneficiary of his estate two days before his death.

That day, according to FBI text messages now in the public record — document EFTA01227447, a 289-page FBI text chain — Shuliak was in Russia. Federal prosecutors, the document shows, were aware of this. They asked her attorney to arrange a conversation about the final phone call and her relationship with Epstein. As far as the public record shows, that conversation never took place. Shuliak has never been charged with any crime.

Shuliak’s background warrants scrutiny. She was introduced to Epstein in 2009, almost immediately after his release from prison in Florida, through an unnamed Russian woman described as a mutual friend. She met him for the first time in Minsk, her hometown. Epstein coached her to pose as a domestic worker to enter the United States. He later instructed her to form a sham marriage with Jennifer Kalin, a former Epstein survivor and ex-girlfriend of Elon Musk’s brother, Kimball. The marriage lasted five years, long enough for Shuliak to gain her U.S. citizenship. Epstein also donated a massive amount of money to get Columbia University to accept Shuliak to its dental surgery program after it initially rejected her application. The bribe worked. She graduated in 2015.

Shuliak also worked for Southern Trust Company, Epstein’s U.S. Virgin Islands entity that processed $184 million through Deutsche Bank between 2013 and 2019 — described in court filings as a conduit for payments to young foreign women.

Shuliak inherited Epstein’s estate, including Zorro Ranch, upon his death. She subsequently sold Little Saint James — Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands — for $60 million to Stephen Deckoff, billionaire founder of Black Diamond Capital Management. Her dental practice is currently located at 6100 Red Hook Quarters, St. Thomas, in the same geographic area.
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And those questions about who Karyna Shuliak may be answering to these days now that she’s in control of the substantial assets that were left in Epstein’s estate brings us the speculation surrounding Epstein’s ties to the Russian government. The speculation appears to be rooted in the fact that Shuliak, a Belarussian, was in Russia on the day of Epstein’s death and that the Huffines, who purchased Zorro Ranch in 2023, made a 2018 trip to Russia as part of a delegation led by Senator Rand Paul. And then there’s Sergei Belyakov, an FSB Academy graduate who met Epstein at least five times and, intriguingly, gathered intelligence on a woman Epstein claimed was attempting to blackmail American businessmen. Epstein not only arranged meetings with Peter Thiel and Thomas Pritzker for Belyakov, but he even apparently attempted to facilitate a meeting between Belyakov and Putin. All in all, it’s hardly evidence that Epstein was some kind of Russian asset, a scenario that flies in the face of decades of apparent protection of Epstein on behalf of US authorities. And recall how, while Robert Maxwell was alleged to work for MI6, the Mossad, and even the KGB, one of the coups he managed to pull off in the PROMIS affair was the sale of the software to the Soviets. But if Epstein really was someone who was used to gather intelligence on women attempting to blackmail American businessmen, that adds a fascinating new dimension to overall story. Was Epstein seen as some kind of elite sexual blackmail guru? Able to be inflict the blackmail but also defend against it?

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The Huffines family’s connections to Russia are documented. In June 2018, Donald Huffines and his twin brother Phillip traveled to Moscow as part of a delegation led by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. The trip was not publicized by either Huffines brother. It became public only after Russian state media released photographs and wire reports from the meeting. Donald Huffines’ spokesman subsequently stated the trip was intended to confront Russian officials about election interference. The meeting included discussions with Sergei Kislyak, the former Russian Ambassador to the United States whose contacts with Trump campaign officials were a central subject of the Mueller investigation.

According to NBC News reporting on the delegation, Rand Paul carried a handwritten letter from President Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian officials at the meeting advocated for the release of Maria Butina, the Russian national who had infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party and was subsequently convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent.

Mary Catherine Huffines was also present at that Moscow meeting, according to photographs published by Russian media — her presence there, like her husband’s, was not previously disclosed.

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Epstein’s own connections to Russian intelligence infrastructure are documented in the federal files. Sergei Belyakov — a graduate of the FSB Academy, which trains Russian intelligence officers, and the man who ran Putin’s flagship St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — met with Epstein at least five times. Epstein referred to him in correspondence as ‘my very good friend.’ According to the files, Belyakov helped Epstein obtain Russian visas, gathered intelligence on a woman Epstein claimed was attempting to blackmail American businessmen, and used Epstein to arrange meetings with American billionaires Peter Thiel and Thomas Pritzker. In return, Epstein attempted to facilitate a meeting between Belyakov and Putin.

In June 2018 — the same summer Epstein was emailing former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland to suggest that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov could benefit from speaking with him — Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines were in Moscow, in a meeting with Kislyak, as part of Rand Paul’s delegation carrying Trump’s letter to Putin.
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And all of those questions raised about the Russian ties to the Epstein operation brings us to the following report from back in February about the many examples of Epstein’s interest in cultivating ties to Russia that have emerged in the released Epstein files. As we’ll see, Epstein was keenly interested in identifying Russia girls for recruitment, with a network of scouts throughout Russia providing him a steady stream of prospects. Evidence indicates Epstein may have traveled to Russia several times, with the files including a 2011 Russian visa application and an older photo of Epstein posing in front of the luxury Hyatt hotel in central Moscow. In 2013, Epstein bragged to to Ehud Barack that, “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference I told him no.” There’s no evidence Putin and Epstein ever met. But Epstein did definitely have a business visa approved, in June of 2018, the same month of the Rand Paul delegation to Moscow attended by the Huffines:

FRANCE 24

DOJ files reveal Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to build Russian ties

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein sought to cultivate ties with Russia’s political elite and repeatedly pressed for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, according to US Justice Department files released on Tuesday. The documents detail Epstein’s travel to Russia and efforts to recruit young women through senior intermediaries.

by FRANCE 24
Issued on: 18/02/2026 — 00:38
Modified: 18/02/2026 — 08:09

Convicted US sex offender JeffreyEpstein sought to build ties with Russia’s political elite and appeared desperate to secure a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, files released by the US Department of Justice show.

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Seeking Putin

“Lets try to set a putin meeting, “Epstein wrote in a January 2014 email to Thorbjorn Jagland, former Norwegian prime minister and then secretary general of the Council of Europe.

He repeated the request to Jagland in 2015 and 2018.

In a 2013 email to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Epstein said: “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference I told him no.”

The files suggest Epstein wanted to pitch a digital currency project to Putin.

AFP found no evidence in the files that the meeting ever took place.

Following the release of documents, Poland said it would probe Epstein’s alleged links to Russian secret services.

Asked whether Epstein was a Russian agent, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “I’m tempted to make a lot of jokes about that version, but let’s not waste our time.”

Visits

The documents indicate Epstein may have travelled to Russia several times.

A Russian business visa was issued to the disgraced financier in June 2018, when Moscow was hosting the football World Cup. Travel itineraries show he had plans to watch Morocco-Iran in Saint Petersburg and Uruguay-France in Nizhny Novgorod.

The DOJ release also includes a 2011 Russian visa application.

The files also show older photos of Epstein posing in front of the luxury Hyatt hotel in central Moscow, and an undated image of his jailed associate Ghislaine Maxwell appearing to stand between two Russian soldiers.

Women

Flight data shows numerous trips booked for Epstein and Russian women on his behalf. Many of the women were proposed to Epstein by scouts and modelling agencies inside Russia, who often emphasised the women were young and blonde.

“She has a perfect body and 100% blond,” one woman with a Russian name wrote toEpsteinin February 2010.

Months earlier the same person had promised in a separate email to “find a ‘flower’ ” during a trip to Russia, which appeared to be financed by Epstein.

Various emails show Epstein and his network exploited the desire of some young women to leave Russia and their precarious immigration status when they were in the United States.

Favours for officials

One of the most prominent Russians in the files is Sergei Belyakov— a former deputy economy minister, graduate of the FSB security service’s academy and who was on the organising committee of Russia’s flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg.

Emails show Belyakov repeatedly asking Epstein for help attracting high-profile US guests to the forum, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring sex from a minor.

“i will be all the help i can. who is your dream att=ndees? peter thiel? nathan myrhvold. ? reid hoffman.?” Epstein wrote to Belyakov.

Epstein also asked Belyakov to gather information on a woman, who he said was “attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessman in New York”.

“Tomorrow I’m meeting with a guy who knows her/about her. if you have any details about case you have mentioned it could help,” Belyakov said in reply.

“I do not know many people like you, who can open new horizons and prospects,” the Russian wrote to Epstein in May 2014 after an apparent meeting.

Another influential figure in the files is veteran Russian diplomat Vitali Churkin, Moscow’s ambassador to the UN from 2006 until his death in 2017.

The documents suggest Epstein and Churkin met several times in 2016–2017. In August 2016, Epstein invited Churkin to a lunch with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and businessman Tom Barrack, now the US ambassador to Turkey.

The files also indicate Epstein helped arrange an internship for Churkin’s son, Maxim, at a New York investment fund in late 2016.

“Max is doing better. He just needed to understand American biz habits,” Epstein wrote in a message to the Russian diplomat, who replied: “U r a great teacher!”

Epstein was also angling for an introduction to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“you might suggest to putin, that lavrov , can get insight on talking to me. vitaly churkin used to . but he died,” Epstein wrote to Jagland in 2018.

...

———-

“DOJ files reveal Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to build Russian ties”; FRANCE 24; 02/18/2026

“A Russian business visa was issued to the disgraced financier in June 2018, when Moscow was hosting the football World Cup. Travel itineraries show he had plans to watch Morocco-Iran in Saint Petersburg and Uruguay-France in Nizhny Novgorod.”

Is it just a coincidence that Epstein got his Russian business visa approved the same month as the Rand Paul delegation to Moscow? We can only speculate. But the fact that Epstein even needed to get that visa approved at all, and didn’t already have a visa, stands in stark contrast to the claims he made to Ehud Barak that he turned down a request from Putin to meet during a St. Petersburg International Economic Forum gathering:

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In a 2013 email to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Epstein said: “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference I told him no.”

The files suggest Epstein wanted to pitch a digital currency project to Putin.

AFP found no evidence in the files that the meeting ever took place.
...

But despite those highly questionable claims by Epstein regarding his ties to Putin, it’s not at all a surprise to learn that his sex trafficking operation had long had a focus on Russia. There had to be an ample supply of potential victims who would be relatively easy to entrap after they are trafficked to another country:

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The documents indicate Epstein may have travelled to Russia several times.

...

The DOJ release also includes a 2011 Russian visa application.

The files also show older photos of Epstein posing in front of the luxury Hyatt hotel in central Moscow, and an undated image of his jailed associate Ghislaine Maxwell appearing to stand between two Russian soldiers.

Women

Flight data shows numerous trips booked for Epstein and Russian women on his behalf. Many of the women were proposed to Epstein by scouts and modelling agencies inside Russia, who often emphasised the women were young and blonde.

“She has a perfect body and 100% blond,” one woman with a Russian name wrote to Epstein in February 2010.

Months earlier the same person had promised in a separate email to “find a ‘flower’ ” during a trip to Russia, which appeared to be financed by Epstein.

Various emails show Epstein and his network exploited the desire of some young women to leave Russia and their precarious immigration status when they were in the United States.
...

Then there’s the interesting fact that Sergei Belyakov apparently repeatedly asked Epstein to help arrange from high profile US guests to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. It’s the kind of detail that adds new context to the bizarre story of Felix Sater’s 2016 overtures to entice Michael Cohen to the forum. It’s not hard to see why Belyakov would have viewed Epstein as someone who could provide those high profile connections:

...
Favours for officials

One of the most prominent Russians in the files is Sergei Belyakov— a former deputy economy minister, graduate of the FSB security service’s academy and who was on the organising committee of Russia’s flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg.

Emails show Belyakov repeatedly asking Epstein for help attracting high-profile US guests to the forum, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring sex from a minor.

“i will be all the help i can. who is your dream att=ndees? peter thiel? nathan myrhvold. ? reid hoffman.?” Epstein wrote to Belyakov.
...

Lastly, regarding Epstein’s request to gather information on a woman who was “attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessman in New York”, we have to ask if this woman was one of Epstein’s own victims. And, more generally, how often did his victims issue blackmail threats of their own? It had to happen at least some times given the shocking number of victims. How did the Epstein operation handle those cases?

...
Epstein also asked Belyakov to gather information on a woman, who he said was “attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessman in New York”.

“Tomorrow I’m meeting with a guy who knows her/about her. if you have any details about case you have mentioned it could help,” Belyakov said in reply.
...

Again, let’s not forget about the claims of bodies buried on the Zorro Ranch. It would be interesting to know how Epstein ultimately ended up handling this blackmail threat. Maybe that information will turn up in the released documents, but keep in mind that roughly half of the 6 million Epstein files are never going to be released according to the DOJ. Which is also a reminder that we’ve really only been allowed to see a fraction of the overall Epstein story and the worst stuff is likely never going to see the light of day. The Epstein affair, and PROMIS, are both decades old at this point. And intertwined. And in both cases we’re still scratching the surface.

In the first of the long AFA shows about the shooting of the Pope (AFA#17) we discuss Opus Dei, founded by Escriva under Francisco Franco and inextricably linked with his regime.

One wonders if Banco Popular was a Franco/Opus Dei project?

https://spitfirelist.com/anti-fascist-archives/rfa-17–21-who-shot-the-pope/

It appears Pope Leo has taken a special interest in Opus Dei, the bizarre far right Catholic cult with a remarkably powerful and influential roster of members. Amazingly, Pope Leo has reportedly taken a keen interest in the allegations published in a 2024 book, Opus, describing decades-long abuses by the group that have a number of alarming parallels to the Epstein story. An global operation of recruiting vulnerable youths into a cult-like lifestyle where they are trafficked, forced to work essentially for free, and abused physically, psychologically, and sexually. But also an operation of recruiting powerful and influential individuals in governments and institutions across the world. Importantly, the book describes how Opus Dei’s ability to maintain this scandalous global operation under wraps was directly tied to the protection offered to group by Vatican, and in particular, Pope John Paul II’s decision to declare the founder of the group, Jose Maria Escriva, a saint in 2002 despite the abundant opposition from inside the Vatican due to the abuse allegations that were already known. Pope John Paul II apparently view the group as a fellow conservative ally inside the Vatican.

In the following interview of the author of the book, Gareth Gore, he recounts how he was stunned to receive a direct invitation to visit with Pope Leo earlier this year. And not only did that meeting happen, but Pope Leo apparently asked a number of incisive questions and even allowed two cameramen in at the end of the interview to make it public. It really is a remarkable turn of events given that Gore is placing much of the blame for Opus Dei’s decades of abuses squarely on the Vatican and calling for a rescinding of Escriva’s sainthood status.

As Gore lays out in the book, the role the Vatican has played in protecting the group’s activities from scrutiny isn’t limited to the fact Opus Dei’s found was declared a saint in 2002. The group had been granted a “personal prelature”, making them answerable to no one but the pope. As a result, any abuse allegations against the group couldn’t be handled in the normal way through the local bishop or archbishop. No other Catholic group before or since has been granted such status. Gore describes how this arrangement emerged from the fact that the Vatican become reliant on funds from Opus Dei in the 1970s. So there was a kind of perverse quid pro quo where the Vatican granted the group untouchable status in exchange for funds.

The book also describes the hierarchical nature of the group’s membership, where there’s “numeraries” and “numerary assistants” who have to live in single-sex dorms under strict, cult like, conditions where physical, psychological, and sex abuse are rampant. The “numerary assistants” are primarily women and girls from underprivileged who are recruited under the pretext of being offered a better life. Cocktails of drugs that include antidepressants, sedatives and even Rohypnol, an infamous “date rape” drug.

But then there’s the “supernumeraries”, who comprise the majority of Opus Dei’s membership. These individuals are invite-only members hailing from positions of wealth and influence and who do not have to live under the strict conditions demanded of the numeraries. It is apparently one of the top responsibilities of numeraries to recruit supernumerary members who can make large donations to the group. So we have an organization that recruits vulnerable youths into a life of abuse, including sexual abuse, but also recruits wealthy and influential members who get to live under a completely different set of rules. Again, it’s hard not to notice the Epstein parallels here.

Except Opus Dei’s abuses long pre-date Epstein’s abuses. In fact, the group, which is almost a century old, apparently hijacked Banco Popular back in the 1940s, turning the bank into a kind of cash machine for the organization. As Gore describes in his book, from the 1950s and onward, funds from the bank were used to finance Opus Dei’s growth around the world, along with its recruitment and human trafficking operations. Banco Popular unexpectedly collapsed in 2017 following a run on the bank in the wake of questions about its ability to service non-performing real estate loans. But Banco Popular isn’t the only time we’ve heard about the collapse of an Opus Dei-affiliated bank. Recall how the figure who was at the head of the Vatican Bank during its collapse in 2010, Ettore Gotti Tedesci, was not only an ardent supporter of ‘free-market’ economic orthodoxy. He was also an Opus Dei member.

Another part of what makes Pope Leo’s interest in the group rather notable is the fact that Pope Leo is an American pope and the US political establishment is one of the group’s biggest areas of influence. Two very notable Opus Dei members Gore mentions in the interview are Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, and Leonard Leo, one of the leading figures in the Federalist Society. As we’ve seen, both Roberts and Leo happen to be members of the CNP, a theocratic entity that includes a number of Catholic and Protestant political reactionaries. In Roberts’s case, his theocratic ties also include a long-standing alliance with theocratic billionaire Tim Dunn and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Recall how the TPPF and the Claremont Institute ran the “79 Days Report ‘simulations in 2020 imagining contested election scenarios. Kevin Roberts, John Eastman, and fascist businessman Charles Haywood all participated in the simulations. And it was Roberts who declared himself the head of Project 2025 and who declared in July of 2024 that the “Second American Revolution” was underway, which could remain bloodless if “the Left allows it to be”. Leonard Leo, of course, is behind the Judicial Crisis Network and a series of other entities that played a major role in backing the the Supreme Court nominations of the first Trump administration. Recall how Leo sat on the board of the Catholic Information Center, the DC-based Opus Dei-owned organization long run by Father C. John McCloskey, before McCloskey had to step down in 2003 over sex abuse allegations. McCloskey was known for facilitating the religious conversions of Sam Brownback, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, economist Lawrence Kudlow, financier Lewis Lehrman, and journalist Robert Novak, among others.

Another notable Opus Dei member is former Attorney General Bill Barr, who, of course, played a central role in the cover up surrounding Epstein’s 2019 ‘suicide’ while in federal custody. Recall how Barr refused to recuse himself from the Epstein investigation despite conflict of interest concerns due to the fact that Barr once worked for a law firm that represented Epstein. It was Bill Barr’s father how hired Epstein as a high school math teacher at the elite Dalton private school (despite lacking a college degree) before he moved into the world of child sex blackmail.

And, of course, let’s not forget about that report from back in 2011 when Seymour Hersh revealed that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff was dominated by members of both the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei. Opus Dei really is one of the most powerful forces in the US government today, along with its CNP allies. And yet, this reality remains barely known or acknowledged to this day. Which is part of what makes the apparent interest of Pope Leo so fascinating. He’s picking a very serious fight here if that’s what he’s really doing.

At this point it’s unclear who exactly is accused to doing the sexual abuse. Were ‘numeraries’ and ‘numerary assistants’ turned into sex slaves for the pleasure of the supernuminary benefactors? If so, are we looking at a similar kind of elite blackmail/influence operation that appeared to comprise much of what Epstein’s operation was all about? That’s unclear, but those are all the kinds of questions we have to hope the pope is now looking into. Adding to the high stakes nature of Pope Leo’s apparent interest in the group is the fact that public prosecutors in Argentina have already conducted a two-year investigation into allegations of abuses by over 40 women. And since those allegations have gone public, more women have come forward in Ireland, Mexico, France, and Spain. And with Opus Dei operating roughly 300 private Catholic schools around the world, odds are there are a lot more allegations to come. Might that explain the pope’s sudden interest? Are we seeing the Vatican getting out ahead of another major abuse scandal? Either way, we can be confident the group isn’t just going to roll over and allow the new pope to expose and it and strip it of its long-held privileges. In other words, Opus Dei’s ‘answers to the pope and only the pope’ status is about to get a major stress test. Hopefully:

The Guardian

He spent years investigating Opus Dei, a Catholic group accused of a vast conspiracy of abuse. Then Pope Leo asked to meet

Gareth Gore’s 2024 book Opus alleges decades of manipulation, which the group has denied. He believes the pope wanted to send a clear message

Sam Wolfson
Mon 6 Apr 2026 07.00 EDT

Gareth Gore was on a research trip to California earlier this year when he was told to expect a call from the Vatican arranging a one-on-one audience with the pope.

Gore was stunned. In 2024 he published the book Opus, a meticulously researched and gripping account of the abuses allegedly perpetrated by Opus Dei, the highly secretive Catholic group started by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá in the 1920s. Over a century Opus Dei established itself as a deeply religious order that, they claim, helps ordinary people “love God and serve others through work well done, carried out with honesty and integrity”.

Gore’s book lays out claims the organisation is at the heart of a conspiracy involving child grooming, human trafficking, and psychological and emotional control, with former members saying the group used private confessions as leverage against members and drugged those under its sway – claims Opus Dei categorically denies. Gore reported that Opus Dei collaborated closely with the bloody dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain, before supporting rightwing causes around the world.

Gore laid much of the blame for these alleged abuses with the wider Catholic church, which relied on Opus Dei for financial support in the 1970s and in return gave it freedom to operate as a legitimate branch of Catholicism, but outside the Vatican’s normal structures. In 2002, Escrivá was made a saint after ferocious lobbying by Opus Dei, despite much protest from within the Vatican, as abuse allegations mounted and some Catholic leaders began to raise questions about the organisation.

...

Gore began reporting on Opus Dei almost by accident. He was a financial journalist looking into the collapse of Banco Popular, one of Spain’s largest banks, in 2017. At the time, the world couldn’t understand how such a pillar of European banking had failed so spectacularly. Gore discovered that the bank had been hijacked by Opus Dei since the 1940s (the bank’s chair was a lifetime member, as were many on its board, and companies controlled by Opus Dei turned out to be the bank’s largest shareholders). Opus Dei had used the bank “as its personal cash machine”, Gore alleged, “siphoning off” funds to finance its expansion around the world. (The trial of Banco Popular’s former leadership, facing allegations of fraud, is scheduled to begin in Spain’s national court in 2027. For its part, Opus Dei has denied that it was involved in the management of the bank and said it “does not get involved in commercial activities”.)

Through hundreds of interviews with former Opus Dei members, Gore’s book traces how from the 1950s onwards, Banco Popular’s wealth went into creating a vast recruitment network targeting children and vulnerable teenagers, building palatial Opus Dei centres across the world, and eventually forming one of the most formidable clandestine political influences in the US. Its US members would become crucial in eroding reproductive rights, funding the Washington march that led to January 6, and heavily influencing Project 2025, according to Gore’s reporting.

Gore’s book also sheds light on the inner workings of Opus Dei. Its most religious members, called numeraries, live in single-sex dormitories in a life of servitude and self-flagellation: they fast for dangerously long periods, wear a small spiked chain called a cilice around their thighs, and whip themselves with ropes, former members told Gore. Every element of their life is strictly controlled and manipulated by the group’s leader and senior priests, Gore said. Mental illness, common in an atmosphere of constant physical and psychological abuse, was treated with a reported cocktail of antidepressants, sedatives and even Rohypnol, according to claims made by victims in interviews Gore conducted.

Female members known as “numerary assistants” – women and girls from mostly underprivileged backgrounds – staffed the Opus Dei residencies, working long days cooking and cleaning. Many of them were allegedly cut off from their families, transported internationally and, in many cases, expected to give their entire salaries to Opus Dei in an operation that Gore believes meets the UN definition of human trafficking. Some made claims to Gore of sexual abuse.

In Argentina, federal prosecutors are leading an investigation into senior leaders of Opus Dei who they accuse of overseeing the exploitation and trafficking of women and girls; Opus Dei in Argentina set up a “healing and resolution” office to hear the women’s complaints. In 2024 it also said allegations that girls were coerced into joining the organization on promises of education at its schools were “false and misleading”. Opus Dei said it was committed to safeguarding minors and vulnerable adults.

Most Opus Dei members don’t live in these conditions. These “supernumeraries” can marry and live in their own homes. The most critical mission of the numeraries is to recruit supernumeraries to make large donations back to Opus Dei and influence politics and society to further Opus Dei’s conservative goals. An Opus Dei priest in Washington DC, who Opus Dei acknowledged has credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, oversaw the 2009 conversion of the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Catholicism.

...

I spoke to Gore, who lives in London, two weeks after his 16 March visit to the Vatican about what happened when he met Pope Leo.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve spent almost a decade compiling this dossier on Opus Dei that implicates the Vatican. How on earth does it happen that you’re invited to present these findings to the pope?

Honestly, I don’t know. I was on a work trip in the States and I got a call from somebody I know in Peru who’s quite close to the pope. And he had heard from the pope himself, that the pope wanted to meet me and to hear more. I remember putting the phone down and having to take a moment: is this for real?

...

How much do you think Pope Leo already knows about the organization?

Who knows how much information actually gets to him. Opus Dei is renowned for having penetrated the Vatican. It’s highly likely there are people there who are limiting what information gets to the pope – perhaps for malicious reasons, but also, as with any other kind of big company or big institution, sometimes it’s better that the boss doesn’t know everything so that there can be some kind of deniability.

In the limited time you had to speak with Pope Leo directly, what was the central story that you wanted to tell him?

I think people on the outside don’t realize the founder of this movement, this Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá, told his members that the idea for Opus Dei had come directly from God. He’d received this vision which he wrote down in meticulous detail.

These writings are the source of all of this control and manipulation and political manoeuvring that’s ongoing today. And so without understanding the internal documents, internal rules, and without understanding that the members truly believe that these rules came directly from God, it’s impossible to understand the mentality of how Opus Dei works. So I was trying to convey that message to [the pope], while also trying to explain why reforming this group will be unbelievably difficult, because the founder is revered as a saint, which he is. He was made a saint by the Vatican in 2002.

So the pope can’t just say, “You guys have got to stop doing this,” because the true believers will continue believing that all of these practices and all of this manipulation is what God wants of them.

How does one hammer things home to the pope? Did you feel like you had the freedom to be persuasive, or do you have to adopt a respectful tone?

I went into the meeting with this kind of burden of wanting to really get this information to him, but I had this attitude of not giving a damn. Maybe I want to rephrase that: I was unafraid of offending him or of breaching etiquette. I just thought: no one else has been given this opportunity and if they throw me out after five minutes, I can live with that because I’ve tried to do what I think is right.

...

How did he respond?

Honestly, the meeting could not have gone any better. He asked a number of very incisive questions. It went on for much longer than was scheduled. There were two cameramen there. And at the end of the meeting, the pope said to me that it had been his decision to invite the cameras in and to make the meeting public. I think he quite clearly wanted to send a signal to Opus Dei that he’s taking these allegations seriously.

Opus Dei is only 100 years old, and perhaps the reason it’s not treated like other groups of the 20th century that have accused of cultlike behaviour is the seal of religious authority that has been stamped on it by the Vatican. Does the Vatican have real powers to rein in Opus Dei if it chose to?

The Vatican helped to create this monster, not least Pope John Paul II because he saw them as political allies in his conservative crusade. He saw them almost like his personal green berets that he could send off to any part of the world where there was some kind of progressive priest or bishop who was causing trouble. He could send Opus Dei there to do his work or be his eyes and ears. He gave them this special status that has never been granted before or since in the history of the Catholic church.

What is that status?

He made them into this thing called the “personal prelature”, which basically meant that they were answerable to no one but the pope. They could operate anywhere they wanted to in the world and any abuse allegations against [Opus Dei] couldn’t be handled in the normal way through the local bishop or archbishop. Ordinary Catholics welcome this group into their homes, they allow their kids to go to its schools, they attend its meetings because [it has] this stamp of approval from the Vatican.

Pope Francis, to his credit, started to take action [before his death in April 2025]. He issued a papal decree in 2022 where he basically ordered Opus Dei to get its house in order. But there was no effort to speak with any former members, no effort to speak with journalists such as myself who investigated the group.

The point I was trying to make to Pope Leo is that if you’re trying to solve a problem, the first step is to understand exactly what the problem is. Which is why I suggested to him that the next logical step would be to open a full independent investigation into all allegations of abuse [by Opus Dei] – whether they are spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical.

Prosecutors are starting to look into the organization too.

Certainly in Argentina, public prosecutors there have conducted a two-year investigation into the allegations made by 43 or 44 women. And after the investigation, these public prosecutors concluded that there were absolutely grounds to charge the group with human trafficking and serious labour offences. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Argentina allegations have come out, we’ve had more women coming forward in places like Ireland, Mexico, France, Spain.

Opus Dei operates about 300 [private Catholic] schools around the world, including in the UK and the US. Not far from my home in south London there are two Opus Dei schools where kids my kids’ age go. The next big step is for governments and for social services to really look into safeguarding practices at these schools and to begin to ask questions about whether this group, which is accused of very serious abuses and crimes, is fit to be looking after young kids and young adults. I would argue that it absolutely is not.

One of the things you’re pushing for is for the canonization of Escrivá to be undone? Would that be terminal for Opus Dei?

Unfortunately people are brainwashed into believing certain things, so whether removing the sainthood of Escrivá would result in this group just dying out, I’m not sure. But it would go a long way to removing this stamp of legitimacy and approval from the Vatican. If all the Vatican does is make a few tweaks around the edges but leaves this guy as a saint, that’s going to send very mixed messages. We have [the founder’s] actual writings in black and white where these practices are not only outlined but mandated and ordered of the membership, which is why this is such an enormous headache for the pope.

People might think that this is an obscure religious group that has little to do with them. Opus Dei says it does not take political positions other than the stances of the Catholic church. But you describe them as having pivotal influence when it comes to the makeup of the supreme court and abortion.

The founder of Opus Dei made it clear that he saw his followers as part of a militia who were going to enter into battle against what he called the “enemies of Christ”. So right from the beginning, this is a political group that uses religion as almost a veneer to hide behind – controlling and manipulating the membership to get them to do things that might benefit Opus Dei politically or financially.

In places like Washington, [Opus Dei has] made a real concerted effort to infiltrate the corridors of power and has been immensely successful. I would argue that today, Opus Dei within the Maga Republican movement is one of the pre-eminent forces. There are several very high-ranking figures inside the White House and the wider Maga ecosystem who are either full-on members of Opus Dei or big supporters. People like Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation [and the force behind Project 2025], is a regular at the Opus Dei centre in central DC and gets his spiritual direction from them. You’ve got Leonard Leo, who helped to orchestrate the conservative takeover of the supreme court and sits on the board of the Opus Dei centre in central Washington. The list goes on.

This is a group that is by invitation only and they target the elites: politicians, judges, business people, journalists, academics.

...

————

“He spent years investigating Opus Dei, a Catholic group accused of a vast conspiracy of abuse. Then Pope Leo asked to meet” by Sam Wolfson; The Guardian; 04/06/2026

“Gore’s book lays out claims the organisation is at the heart of a conspiracy involving child grooming, human trafficking, and psychological and emotional control, with former members saying the group used private confessions as leverage against members and drugged those under its sway – claims Opus Dei categorically denies. Gore reported that Opus Dei collaborated closely with the bloody dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain, before supporting rightwing causes around the world.”

A decades-long conspiracy of child grooming, human trafficking, and psychological and emotional control. That’s the horrific history of Opus Dei laid out in Gareth Gore’s book published in 2024. But the book isn’t just a condemnation of Opus Dei. As Gore makes clear, the wider Catholic Church, including past popes, have played a major role in the promotion and apparent validation of the group’s dangerous beliefs, seemingly in exchange for Opu Dei’s financial support in the 1970s. 2002, Pope John Paul II made the group’s founder, Josemaria Escriva, a saint, despite the abuse allegations that were already leveled against the organization by that point and much protest inside the Vatican. The pope even made the group into the “personal prelature” that is answerable to no one but the pope, thus ensuring that allegations wouldn’t be handled through normal channels. No other Catholic group has ever had status. Opus Dei has been operating as a kind of ‘above the law’ Catholic entity for decades, ostensibly with a mission delivered to Escriva directly from God, with the blessing of a pope, no less! That’s all part of the stunning context of Pope Leo seeking out an audience with Gore. The Opus Dei mega-scandal is a papal mega-scandal and, if we’re lucky, the present pope is going to do something about it:

...
Gore was stunned. In 2024 he published the book Opus, a meticulously researched and gripping account of the abuses allegedly perpetrated by Opus Dei, the highly secretive Catholic group started by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá in the 1920s. Over a century Opus Dei established itself as a deeply religious order that, they claim, helps ordinary people “love God and serve others through work well done, carried out with honesty and integrity”.

...

Gore laid much of the blame for these alleged abuses with the wider Catholic church, which relied on Opus Dei for financial support in the 1970s and in return gave it freedom to operate as a legitimate branch of Catholicism, but outside the Vatican’s normal structures. In 2002, Escrivá was made a saint after ferocious lobbying by Opus Dei, despite much protest from within the Vatican, as abuse allegations mounted and some Catholic leaders began to raise questions about the organisation.

...

In the limited time you had to speak with Pope Leo directly, what was the central story that you wanted to tell him?

I think people on the outside don’t realize the founder of this movement, this Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá, told his members that the idea for Opus Dei had come directly from God. He’d received this vision which he wrote down in meticulous detail.

These writings are the source of all of this control and manipulation and political manoeuvring that’s ongoing today. And so without understanding the internal documents, internal rules, and without understanding that the members truly believe that these rules came directly from God, it’s impossible to understand the mentality of how Opus Dei works. So I was trying to convey that message to [the pope], while also trying to explain why reforming this group will be unbelievably difficult, because the founder is revered as a saint, which he is. He was made a saint by the Vatican in 2002.

So the pope can’t just say, “You guys have got to stop doing this,” because the true believers will continue believing that all of these practices and all of this manipulation is what God wants of them.

...

Opus Dei is only 100 years old, and perhaps the reason it’s not treated like other groups of the 20th century that have accused of cult like behaviour is the seal of religious authority that has been stamped on it by the Vatican. Does the Vatican have real powers to rein in Opus Dei if it chose to?

The Vatican helped to create this monster, not least Pope John Paul II because he saw them as political allies in his conservative crusade. He saw them almost like his personal green berets that he could send off to any part of the world where there was some kind of progressive priest or bishop who was causing trouble. He could send Opus Dei there to do his work or be his eyes and ears. He gave them this special status that has never been granted before or since in the history of the Catholic church.

What is that status?

He made them into this thing called the “personal prelature”, which basically meant that they were answerable to no one but the pope. They could operate anywhere they wanted to in the world and any abuse allegations against [Opus Dei] couldn’t be handled in the normal way through the local bishop or archbishop. Ordinary Catholics welcome this group into their homes, they allow their kids to go to its schools, they attend its meetings because [it has] this stamp of approval from the Vatican.

Pope Francis, to his credit, started to take action [before his death in April 2025]. He issued a papal decree in 2022 where he basically ordered Opus Dei to get its house in order. But there was no effort to speak with any former members, no effort to speak with journalists such as myself who investigated the group.

The point I was trying to make to Pope Leo is that if you’re trying to solve a problem, the first step is to understand exactly what the problem is. Which is why I suggested to him that the next logical step would be to open a full independent investigation into all allegations of abuse [by Opus Dei] – whether they are spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical.

...

One of the things you’re pushing for is for the canonization of Escrivá to be undone? Would that be terminal for Opus Dei?

Unfortunately people are brainwashed into believing certain things, so whether removing the sainthood of Escrivá would result in this group just dying out, I’m not sure. But it would go a long way to removing this stamp of legitimacy and approval from the Vatican. If all the Vatican does is make a few tweaks around the edges but leaves this guy as a saint, that’s going to send very mixed messages. We have [the founder’s] actual writings in black and white where these practices are not only outlined but mandated and ordered of the membership, which is why this is such an enormous headache for the pope.
...

Intriguingly, as Gore points out, Opus Dei is also known for having penetrated the Vatican and is likely playing an active role in shaping the information made available to the pope about the group’s operations. So when Gore met the pope and found that he was asking one incisive question after another, and even filmed the meeting, we have to wonder about the internal dynamics between the group and the current papal administration. It’s the kind of question that serves as a reminder that, while Opus Dei has undoubtedly served as a mechanism of papal influence on important people and institutions around the world, the group presumably also working to influence the pope too. This is a group with its own far right agenda that isn’t going to necessarily be aligned with every upcoming pope:

...
How much do you think Pope Leo already knows about the organization?

Who knows how much information actually gets to him. Opus Dei is renowned for having penetrated the Vatican. It’s highly likely there are people there who are limiting what information gets to the pope – perhaps for malicious reasons, but also, as with any other kind of big company or big institution, sometimes it’s better that the boss doesn’t know everything so that there can be some kind of deniability.

...

How did he respond?

Honestly, the meeting could not have gone any better. He asked a number of very incisive questions. It went on for much longer than was scheduled. There were two cameramen there. And at the end of the meeting, the pope said to me that it had been his decision to invite the cameras in and to make the meeting public. I think he quite clearly wanted to send a signal to Opus Dei that he’s taking these allegations seriously.
...

And that brings us to the horrid allegations against the group. Allegations that sure have quite a few parallels to the elite sex trafficking/influencing activities of Jeffrey Epstein. On one level, we have a kind of slave class in the organization, the “numeraries”, who live in single-sex dorms where their lives are strictly controlled, physical and psychological abuse is rampant, and drug cocktails that. There’s even “numerary assistants” – women and girls from mostly underprivileged backgrounds – who staff the Opus Dei residences, living a life that Gore describes as fitting the UN definition of human trafficking, including sex abuse. But then there’s the “supernumeraries”, the wealthy and influential members who comprise the bulk of the Opus Dei membership and who get to live lives unencumbered by the group’s harsh restrictions. The recruitment of these supernumeraries, who, in turn, make large donations to the group, is seen as an essential mission of the organization. In other words, Opus Dei is a group that relies on the systematic recruitment, control, and abuse of large numbers of young, underprivileged people, in order to support a system designed to recruit the wealthy and powerful. It’s not exactly like Epstein’s operation, but the parallels are hard to ignore. Incredibly influential members like Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, and Leonard Leo, the key architect of the Federal Society’s takeover of the federal judiciary. As we’ve seen, Roberts is much more than the head of the Heritage Foundation. As the we’ve seen, Roberts is a member of theocratic CNP and the former president of the TPPF, an entity closely aligned with billionaire Texas theocrat Tim Dunn. Recall how the TPPF and the Claremont Institute ran the “79 Days Report ‘simulations in 2020 imagining contested election scenarios. Kevin Roberts, John Eastman, and fascist businessman Charles Haywood all participated in the simulations. And it was Roberts who declared himself the head of Project 2025 and who declared in July of 2024 that the “Second American Revolution” was underway, which could remain bloodless if “the Left allows it to be”. Roberts might be a member of Opus Dei, but that’s far from the only theocratic organization he’s part of. Similarly, Leonard Leo, also a member of the CNP and a highly influential figure in the conservative movement, has a track record of working with all sorts of theocrats and other types of power mongers. Which is a reminder that Opus Dei’s ultimately agenda is less about the elevation of some sort of bizarre Catholic cult and more about raw power. The cultish part of Opus Dei is more about manipulating the young victims:

...
Gore’s book also sheds light on the inner workings of Opus Dei. Its most religious members, called numeraries, live in single-sex dormitories in a life of servitude and self-flagellation: they fast for dangerously long periods, wear a small spiked chain called a cilice around their thighs, and whip themselves with ropes, former members told Gore. Every element of their life is strictly controlled and manipulated by the group’s leader and senior priests, Gore said. Mental illness, common in an atmosphere of constant physical and psychological abuse, was treated with a reported cocktail of antidepressants, sedatives and even Rohypnol, according to claims made by victims in interviews Gore conducted.

Female members known as “numerary assistants” – women and girls from mostly underprivileged backgrounds – staffed the Opus Dei residencies, working long days cooking and cleaning. Many of them were allegedly cut off from their families, transported internationally and, in many cases, expected to give their entire salaries to Opus Dei in an operation that Gore believes meets the UN definition of human trafficking. Some made claims to Gore of sexual abuse.

...

Most Opus Dei members don’t live in these conditions. These “supernumeraries” can marry and live in their own homes. The most critical mission of the numeraries is to recruit supernumeraries to make large donations back to Opus Dei and influence politics and society to further Opus Dei’s conservative goals. An Opus Dei priest in Washington DC, who Opus Dei acknowledged has credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, oversaw the 2009 conversion of the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Catholicism.

...

People might think that this is an obscure religious group that has little to do with them. Opus Dei says it does not take political positions other than the stances of the Catholic church. But you describe them as having pivotal influence when it comes to the makeup of the supreme court and abortion.

The founder of Opus Dei made it clear that he saw his followers as part of a militia who were going to enter into battle against what he called the “enemies of Christ”. So right from the beginning, this is a political group that uses religion as almost a veneer to hide behind – controlling and manipulating the membership to get them to do things that might benefit Opus Dei politically or financially.

In places like Washington, [Opus Dei has] made a real concerted effort to infiltrate the corridors of power and has been immensely successful. I would argue that today, Opus Dei within the Maga Republican movement is one of the pre-eminent forces. There are several very high-ranking figures inside the White House and the wider Maga ecosystem who are either full-on members of Opus Dei or big supporters. People like Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation [and the force behind Project 2025], is a regular at the Opus Dei centre in central DC and gets his spiritual direction from them. You’ve got Leonard Leo, who helped to orchestrate the conservative takeover of the supreme court and sits on the board of the Opus Dei centre in central Washington. The list goes on.

This is a group that is by invitation only and they target the elites: politicians, judges, business people, journalists, academics.
...

And then we get to this very interesting history of the group’s ties to Banco Popular, which was apparently hijacked by Opus Dei in the 1940s and turned into the group’s cash machine. But Banco Popular wealth wasn’t just used to expand the group’s influence. It also went into creating a vast recruitment network targeting children and vulnerable teens. The systematic abuse of young people was a core function of this incredibly powerful organization that seemingly exists to promote its own power and influence. It’s as if the Epstein operation was based on Opus Dei:

...
Gore began reporting on Opus Dei almost by accident. He was a financial journalist looking into the collapse of Banco Popular, one of Spain’s largest banks, in 2017. At the time, the world couldn’t understand how such a pillar of European banking had failed so spectacularly. Gore discovered that the bank had been hijacked by Opus Dei since the 1940s (the bank’s chair was a lifetime member, as were many on its board, and companies controlled by Opus Dei turned out to be the bank’s largest shareholders). Opus Dei had used the bank “as its personal cash machine”, Gore alleged, “siphoning off” funds to finance its expansion around the world. (The trial of Banco Popular’s former leadership, facing allegations of fraud, is scheduled to begin in Spain’s national court in 2027. For its part, Opus Dei has denied that it was involved in the management of the bank and said it “does not get involved in commercial activities”.)

Through hundreds of interviews with former Opus Dei members, Gore’s book traces how from the 1950s onwards, Banco Popular’s wealth went into creating a vast recruitment network targeting children and vulnerable teenagers, building palatial Opus Dei centres across the world, and eventually forming one of the most formidable clandestine political influences in the US. Its US members would become crucial in eroding reproductive rights, funding the Washington march that led to January 6, and heavily influencing Project 2025, according to Gore’s reporting.
...

Finally, note how this isn’t just a story about a remarkable interest taken by Pope Leo into the allegations in Gareth Gore’s book. Investigations are already underway in Argentina, with more abuse victims coming forward in places like Ireland, Mexico, France, Spain. It’s the kind of context that doesn’t just make Pope Leo’s apparent interest quite significant, but also suggests that Opus Dei is going to be feeling increasingly vulnerable and, presumably, increasingly anti-Pope Leo. Which raises the question of what kind of response we should expect from Opus Dei and its arch-conservative allies inside in Vatican. This is one of the most powerful and influential organizations on the planet with reach into governments around the world. They aren’t just going to allow their privileged status to be stripped away by the pope without a fight:

...
In Argentina, federal prosecutors are leading an investigation into senior leaders of Opus Dei who they accuse of overseeing the exploitation and trafficking of women and girls; Opus Dei in Argentina set up a “healing and resolution” office to hear the women’s complaints. In 2024 it also said allegations that girls were coerced into joining the organization on promises of education at its schools were “false and misleading”. Opus Dei said it was committed to safeguarding minors and vulnerable adults.

...

Prosecutors are starting to look into the organization too.

Certainly in Argentina, public prosecutors there have conducted a two-year investigation into the allegations made by 43 or 44 women. And after the investigation, these public prosecutors concluded that there were absolutely grounds to charge the group with human trafficking and serious labour offences. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Argentina allegations have come out, we’ve had more women coming forward in places like Ireland, Mexico, France, Spain.

Opus Dei operates about 300 [private Catholic] schools around the world, including in the UK and the US. Not far from my home in south London there are two Opus Dei schools where kids my kids’ age go. The next big step is for governments and for social services to really look into safeguarding practices at these schools and to begin to ask questions about whether this group, which is accused of very serious abuses and crimes, is fit to be looking after young kids and young adults. I would argue that it absolutely is not.
...

Pressure is ramping up. Does the pope have the authority to reign this organization in? Public prosecutors? Time will tell. But given that we’re talking about a century-old organization that has managed to cultivate one of the most influential rosters of members on the planet, and potentially operates an Epstein-like elite blackmail network, you probably don’t want to hold your breath.

According to LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in low Earth orbit, the recent incident, which took place at ~560km above the Earth, was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” In other words, something probably just broke on the satellite. Probably. But note the reality that LeoLabs is purely speculating here and, sure, maybe it really was just an internal event caused by something spontaneously breaking on the satellite. Perhaps a battery exploded or a propulsion tank started leaking. There’s simply not enough information available to know for sure.

But let’s not forget that mysterious seemingly spontaneous “fragment creation events” are also exactly the kind of thing we might expect from a space junk incident. And while LeoLabs’s has the ability to track space junk, it can’t track all space junk. Starlink even put out a statement about how, “We will continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the US Space Force,” which is an implicit admission that untrackable debris could have been created too. Untrackable debris that’s just floating along unseen and ready to create more “fragment creation events” if that debris does de-orbit sooner rather than later.

Similarly, following the incident in December, Starlink put out a statement that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Was this anomaly due to some sort of “internal energetic source” like an exploding battery? Or did a tiny piece of space junk hit it? We have no idea and it doesn’t sound like Starlink knows either, even though the company issued assurances at the time that it was confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” the company claimed at the time.

Yes, the company didn’t seem to know what the anomaly was, but it was confident it could prevent it and was already deploying a solution. Three months later, another very similar sounding anomaly. What’s going on here?

Notably, the anomaly back in December wasn’t the only incident Starlink reported that month. There was also a near-collision event with a satellite that had just been deployed by a Chinese company setting up its own satellite cluster. The Starlink satellite reportedly came within 200 meters of the Chinese satellite. Starlink squared centered responsibility for the near-hit on the Chinese company for a lack of coordination. “As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude,” according to the company at the time. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators—this needs to change.” It’s a remarkable admission if true. For all the assurances Starlink and others might make about all the steps they are taking to safely operate in space, those assurances are worthless if ALL of these operators aren’t also coordinating with each other adequately. That’s what Starlink admitted back in December, which is basically an admission that many more incidents like this are inevitable. This is a good time to recall how Starlink has long touted the automated collision avoidance system that is integral to how its satellite cluster operates because there are so many satellites they can’t feasibly be put into independent orbits. Avoid collisions is a routine part of how it operates. And while it’s going to be relatively easy for Starlink to track and prevent collisions among its own satellites, collisions between different satellite operators apparently potentially poses a much greater threat. A threat that’s only going to grow as more and more players into into this low Earth orbit space with satellite clusters of their own. It’s a space race, after all. This is only getting worse.

The following article also notes another noteworthy admission Starlink has made regarding the implications of satellites falling out or orbit: the company claims the satellites are designed to burn up entirely such that, even if a piece does somehow make it to the ground intact, the impact energy will be negligible. On the one hand, if true, that’s great to hear from the standpoint of not getting hit by a falling satellite. But on the other hand, it’s worth keeping in mind that one of the other hazards created by this flood of new satellite clusters is the threat of aluminum oxide pollution destroying the ozone layer as a consequence of the aluminum-heavy satellites burning up on reentry. The more completely these satellites burn up, the more ozone-destroying pollution with each reentry event. It’s a trade-off.

And that’s assuming a best-case scenario that the satellites, and any related ‘fragments’ all reenter the atmosphere in a timely manner and don’t end up as semi-permanent space junk that risks further “fragment creation events”. Which brings us to another important update on this topic that we got back in April of 2025 at the 9th European Conference on Space Debris in Bonn, Germany, when none other than Donald Kessler presented an update on his “Kessler Syndrome” theory on out-of-control space junk chain-reactions first posed by Kessler decades ago. So what was the update? Well, they introduced a revised model for estimating orbital stability, concluding that “The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km. Planned deployments of large constellations will likely lead to the population of intact objects across an even greater extent of low Earth orbit exceeding the runaway threshold.” Keep in mind that this mystery “fragment creation even” took place at ~560km, so Kessler is talking about this exact low Earth orbit space where all these satellite clusters are being deployed. In other words, we’ve already passed a threshold where Kessler Syndrome will likely unfold in the space that is still be filled with more and more satellites. Don’t forget that Starlink has plans for over 40,000 satellites and it’s only about 25% of the way there so far. And that’s not counting Musk’s musings about launching a network of up to 1 million satellites dedicated to AI computations. So either Donald Kessler is very, very wrong in his estimations, or we are careening towards an accelerating Kessler syndrome scenario. Sooner rather than later, as these mysterious “fragment creation events” suggest:

ArsTechnica

Starlink satellite breaks apart into “tens of objects”; SpaceX confirms “anomaly”

Satellite failure cause is unexplained after second “fragment creation event.”

Jon Brodkin – Mar 31, 2026 4:28 PM

SpaceX’s Starlink division confirmed yesterday that it lost contact with a satellite on Sunday and is trying to locate space debris that might have been produced by… whatever happened there.

Starlink said there appeared to be “no new risk” to other space operations and did not use the word “explosion.” But it seems that something caused a Starlink broadband satellite to break apart into at least tens of pieces. LeoLabs, which operates a radar network that can track objects in low Earth orbit, said in an X post that it “detected a fragment creation event involving SpaceX Starlink 34343,” one of the 10,000 or so Starlink satellites in orbit.

...

LeoLabs said the breakup was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” Because of “the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks,” it said.

Two anomalies in orbit

Starlink said in an X post yesterday that “Starlink satellite 34343 experienced an anomaly on-orbit, resulting in loss of communications with the satellite at ~560 km above Earth.” Starlink said its “analysis shows the event poses no new risk” to the International Space Station, its crew, or NASA’s Artemis II mission that could launch as soon as Wednesday.

“We will continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the US Space Force,” Starlink said. “The event also posed no new risk to this morning’s Transporter-16 mission, which was designed to avoid Starlink with payload deploys well above or well below the constellation. The SpaceX and Starlink teams are actively working to determine root cause and will rapidly implement any necessary corrective actions.”

LeoLabs said yesterday that the new event is similar to one from December 17, 2025, which also produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object. LeoLabs said it wants more information on the anomalies.

...

Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.

In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.

...

Starlink reported near-crash after Chinese launch

Starlink also had a near-crash in December, in a different incident about a week before the “tumbling” satellite. Starlink Senior VP Michael Nicolls wrote on December 12 that a Chinese company had launched nine satellites without coordinating with other space users. Lack of coordination increases the risk of collisions, he said.

“As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude,” Nicolls wrote at the time, referring to the Chinese launch. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators—this needs to change.”

Coordination can only become more important if SpaceX goes through with its stated plan of launching a million satellites to create an orbital data center.

Under normal circumstances, Starlink satellites reaching their end-of-life date follow “a targeted reentry approach to deorbit satellites over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes,” Starlink says in a document on “satellite demisability.” But satellites that fall to Earth unexpectedly should pose no risk to people on the ground because they are designed to “demise with extremely low impact energy,” according to Starlink.

“A critical aspect of sustainable satellite design is demisability, which ensures that satellites fully break up and burn up during atmospheric reentry,” Starlink says in the document. “Any fragments that do not completely demise should have negligible impact energy.”

————

“Starlink satellite breaks apart into “tens of objects”; SpaceX confirms “anomaly”” by Jon Brodkin;
ArsTechnica; 03/31/2026

“Starlink said there appeared to be “no new risk” to other space operations and did not use the word “explosion.” But it seems that something caused a Starlink broadband satellite to break apart into at least tens of pieces. LeoLabs, which operates a radar network that can track objects in low Earth orbit, said in an X post that it “detected a fragment creation event involving SpaceX Starlink 34343,” one of the 10,000 or so Starlink satellites in orbit.”

A “fragment creation event” that resulted int tens of pieces. That’s the apparent fallout from the mystery incident that caused a Starlink satellite to break apart a few days ago. Was it an “internal energetic source” (like an exploding battery), as LeoLabs suggests was the case, rather than a collision? We’re forced to speculate at this point. But let’s hope LeoLabs is correct in its prediction that the debris should de-orbit within a few weeks, because the last thing we want is debris that just lingers. But let’s also keep in mind that even if one of those pieces of debris ends up lingering, that’s a recipe for more mysterious “fragment creation events” in the future. Kessler Syndrome seeds:

...
LeoLabs said the breakup was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” Because of “the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks,” it said.
...

And note the particular altitude of the affected satellite: ~560 km above Earth. It’s an altitude that we are constantly assured is safe to clutter up because it’s so low objects in orbit inevitably de-orbit in relatively short order. Weeks to months. As we’re going to see, Donald Kessler’s 2025 update just raise serious questions about those assurances:

...
Starlink said in an X post yesterday that “Starlink satellite 34343 experienced an anomaly on-orbit, resulting in loss of communications with the satellite at ~560 km above Earth.” Starlink said its “analysis shows the event poses no new risk” to the International Space Station, its crew, or NASA’s Artemis II mission that could launch as soon as Wednesday.
...

And observe how Starlink refers to its commitment to continuing to monitor trackable debris. It’s a reminder that debris that is small enough may not be trackable. In other words, the tens of fragments estimate could be a significant underestimate if there was a lot of small debris created. Also keep in mind that untrackable debris are a great way to create mysterious “fragment creation events” that don’t seem to have a readily available explanation:

...
“We will continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the US Space Force,” Starlink said. “The event also posed no new risk to this morning’s Transporter-16 mission, which was designed to avoid Starlink with payload deploys well above or well below the constellation. The SpaceX and Starlink teams are actively working to determine root cause and will rapidly implement any necessary corrective actions.”
...

Adding to the mystery is the fact that this isn’t the first time such an anomaly happened in recent months. Just three months earlier, a Starlink satellite produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object when an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Are we looking at a design flaw manifesting? Or collisions with untrackable space junk?

...
LeoLabs said yesterday that the new event is similar to one from December 17, 2025, which also produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object. LeoLabs said it wants more information on the anomalies.

...

Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.

In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.
...

And then there’s the near-crash incident, also just a few months ago, when a Starlink satellite at ~560 km came within 200 meters of a newly deployed Chinese satellite. Starlink blamed it on the Chinese company for no coordinating and deconfliction. Which is a stunning deflection by Starlink since it implies that widespread coordination among all the players who are launching their own satellite clusters into orbit at these same altitudes is required to avoid collision. If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine anything other that a growing number of mistakes as this satellite cluster ‘space race’ only accelerates. And as the article notes, such coordination is only going to be more and more important for everyone if Musk succeeds in building a network of up to 1 million satellites dedicated to AI computations. Orders of magnitude more deconfliction will be required to avoid an increasingly catastrophic outcome:

...
Starlink also had a near-crash in December, in a different incident about a week before the “tumbling” satellite. Starlink Senior VP Michael Nicolls wrote on December 12 that a Chinese company had launched nine satellites without coordinating with other space users. Lack of coordination increases the risk of collisions, he said.

“As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude,” Nicolls wrote at the time, referring to the Chinese launch. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators—this needs to change.”

Coordination can only become more important if SpaceX goes through with its stated plan of launching a million satellites to create an orbital data center.
...

And regarding Starlink’s claims that any fragments that don’t burn up upon reentry “should have negligible impact energy”, keep in mind that it’s the burning of aluminum-heavy materials that produces ozone-destroying Aluminum-oxide and poses a new threat to the ozone layer. In other words, designing these satellites to burn up entirely might sound great but it’s a trade-off:

...
Under normal circumstances, Starlink satellites reaching their end-of-life date follow “a targeted reentry approach to deorbit satellites over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes,” Starlink says in a document on “satellite demisability.” But satellites that fall to Earth unexpectedly should pose no risk to people on the ground because they are designed to “demise with extremely low impact energy,” according to Starlink.

“A critical aspect of sustainable satellite design is demisability, which ensures that satellites fully break up and burn up during atmospheric reentry,” Starlink says in the document. “Any fragments that do not completely demise should have negligible impact energy.”
...

So with the second mystery “fragment creation event” in three months, it’s worth taking a look at the update on Kessler Syndrome provided by none other than Donald Kessler back in April of 2025 at the 9th European Conference on Space Debris in Bonn, Germany. As Kessler concludes, it’s not a matter of if or when orbital instability is triggered. “The current (March 2025) population of intact objects is now above the threshold for an unstable environment at altitudes between 420 km and 1000 km”, according to Kessler. “Furthermore, the threshold for a runaway environment has now been exceeded or is close to being exceeded at altitudes between about 520 km and 1000 km, even if upper stages are ignored.”:

Proc. 9th European Conference on Space Debris, Bonn, Germany, 1–4 April 2025, published by the ESA Space Debris Office

CRITICAL NUMBER OF SPACECRAFT IN LOW EARTH ORBIT: A NEW ASSESSMENT OF THE STABILITY OF THE ORBITAL DEBRIS ENVIRONMENT

Hugh G. Lewis(1) and Donald J. Kessler

ABSTRACT

The stability model by Kessler and Anz-Meador identified regions near 900 km and 1400 km where the number of intact objects in the February 1999 satellite catalogue exceeded the critical number needed for a runaway environment. The deployment of large constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit, has prompted a new analysis with this approach. Using data from on-orbit fragmentation events, this paper introduces a revised stability model for altitudes below 1020 km and evaluates the March 2025 population of payloads and rocket stages to identify new regions of instability. The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km. Planned deployments of large constellations will likely lead to the population of intact objects across an even greater extent of low Earth orbit exceeding the runaway threshold.

...

5 CONCLUSIONS

The intentional collision breakup of the Fengyun-1C satellite, the accidental collision of Iridium-33 with Cosmos-2251, and a new ground-based hypervelocity impact test have enabled an update to the work previously reported by Kessler and Anz-Meador in [1]. In combination with data from the P‑78 orbital satellite test and the Transit ground-based test, an analysis of these collisions has confirmed the previous findings that large regions of low Earth orbit were unstable, leading then to an expectation of an increasing fragment population due to random collisions. In the “best case” evaluated by Kessler and Anz-Meador, which excluded upper stages in the February 1999 population, the increase would likely have levelled off and reached a new, higher equilibrium level. However, inclusion of the upper stages may have prevented an equilibrium environment being reached in the region between 800 km and 970 km.

The current (March 2025) population of intact objects is now above the threshold for an unstable environment at altitudes between 420 km and 1000 km, based on updated stability model values from the additional orbital collisions and a new ground-based test. As before, this instability will cause a slowly increasing fragment population across a broad range of LEO altitudes. Furthermore, the threshold for a runaway environment has now been exceeded or is close to being exceeded at altitudes between about 520 km and 1000 km, even if upper stages are ignored.

The continuing absence of hypervelocity breakup data for upper stages and the underestimation of fragment sizes in the decimetre range from SSN-derived RCS measurements are limitations in the current work. However, the differences between the 2001 and 2025 “critical numbers” are relatively small – it is the significant change in the population of intact objects below 1000 km over the last two decades that has driven the expansion of the regions of instability.

The current intact population is increasing at an unprecedented rate, with ITU filings suggesting more than 1 million satellites could enter orbit in the near future. Many of these new satellites will form large constellations of satellites, with several targeting the regions of instability identified. Despite the mitigation potential arising from collision avoidance manoeuvres, the rate of increase in collision fragments will increase substantially. As noted already in [1], and reinforced by the results presented above, these conditions mean that after some period of time – perhaps shorter than previously anticipated – the intact population would be difficult to maintain because the fragment population would become too hazardous to continue space operations in low Earth orbit. This finding has implications for large constellations already in orbit and those that are planned.

Whilst these conclusions are not too different from those of previous studies and point to instabilities that are likely anticipated in the context of a possible 1 million satellites, they serve to emphasise the importance and timeliness of limiting future breakups in space and of identifying management tools that address the
environmental conditions leading to instability.

...

————–

“CRITICAL NUMBER OF SPACECRAFT IN LOW EARTH ORBIT: A NEW ASSESSMENT OF THE STABILITY OF THE ORBITAL DEBRIS ENVIRONMENT” by Hugh G. Lewis and Donald J. Kessler; Proc. 9th European Conference on Space Debris, Bonn, Germany, 1–4 April 2025, published by the ESA Space Debris Office

“The current (March 2025) population of intact objects is now above the threshold for an unstable environment at altitudes between 420 km and 1000 km, based on updated stability model values from the additional orbital collisions and a new ground-based test. As before, this instability will cause a slowly increasing fragment population across a broad range of LEO altitudes. Furthermore, the threshold for a runaway environment has now been exceeded or is close to being exceeded at altitudes between about 520 km and 1000 km, even if upper stages are ignored.”

The threshold for a runaway environment has now been exceeded or is close to be exceeded between about 520 km and 1000 km. That sure sounds like Starlink territory.

What hasn’t been remotely exceeded is the ambitions of Musk and others to dramatically expand the number of objects in orbit, damn the warnings. And at this rate we really shouldn’t be surprised if Musk succeeds in putting a million objects into orbit. Perhaps it will be a million AI satellites. Or maybe a million untrackable objects created through mysterious “fragment creation events”. Either/or. We’ll see which one happens first.

First, there was the investigation into Epstein’s death itself. As the report notes, with investigators arriving at a ‘suicide’ conclusion early on, with no foul play suspected, the only thing left to be investigated was whether or not the actions of the corrections officers somehow contributed to Epstein’s apparent ‘suicide’. We are told that it was this early investigative conclusion that resulted in his cell never even being considered a possible crime scene that would, under normal circumstances, be examined by experienced criminal and forensic experts who would take fingerprints, blood samples and other evidence.

Of course, as we’ve seen, the initial handling of the discovery of Epstein’s body didn’t just involve a lack of standard forensic evidentiary collection like DNA and fingerprints. There was literally the moving of Epstein’s body, making it impossible to determine how he died, along with the staging of evidence of the alleged hanging in a different cell. That was the fabrication of evidence! And then there’s the fact that Epstein’s death was immediately attributed to a hanging despite the forensic pathologist hired by Mark Epstein, Dr. Michael Baden, declaring that evidence was more consistent with Epstein being struck in the neck and strangulated. And while Baden is certainly a highly questionable figure with a history that includes endorsing the JFK single bullet theory, it’s not as if Baden is a lone voice in calling the investigation of farce. The fact that he’s been openly calling the forensic examination of Epstein fraudulent does align with virtually everything else we’ve seen in the handling of this case.

At the same time, it’s worth keeping in mind that one thing achieved by Baden’s refutation of the official forensic conclusions is a confirmation that, yes, Epstein really is very much dead. If Epstein is actually alive and well somewhere, the debate over whether he hung himself or was strangled only serves to obscure that ‘still alive’ possibility. And while the ‘Epstein still lives’ scenario is indeed a wild one that would require all sorts of extenuating circumstances to actually be plausible, there’s no denying that the utterly corrupt nature of the investigation into his death is quite extenuating. The more we learn, and the clearer it gets that the official investigation was a corrupt farce, the less implausible those ‘wild’ scenarios get too. Including an alleged decoy double that was deployed to ‘fool the media’ as Epstein’s body was removed from the facility. Which makes this a good time to recall how, when Mark Epstein first started going public back in March of 2023 with his concerns about the official investigation into his brother’s death, one of the mysteries at that time was why the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) report on the investigation was taking so long to be released in the first place. It had been over three years at that point When the OIG report was finally released back in June of 2023, we subsequently learned that it was filled with absurdities, including making no mention of a ‘missing minute’ in the security footage. A ‘missing minute’ that, after being exposed by a CBS investigation, ultimately led to the revelation that it was possible for someone to enter and exit the Special Housing Unit (SHU) and Epstein’s tier without getting captured on video at all. Robert Hood, a former BOP chief of internal affairs and warden of the Supermax facility in Colorado, said he has reviewed the OIG report, called it inadequate, and called for the release of internal investigative reports.

And all of those questions about the integrity of the investigation into Epstein’s death and issues involving both the lack of the standard evidentiary collection and the fabrication of evidence brings us to a second investigation into ‘irregularities’ that we’re now learning about in the following report. It turns out the FBI opened a possible obstruction of justice investigation into the staff of the Manhattan prison just days after Epstein’s alleged suicide on August 10, 2019. The probe was initially triggered when a corrections officer called the the FBI’s Threat Operations Center on the evening of Friday August 16, warning that an after-action team charged with investigating the Epstein death was shredding huge amounts of paperwork. Officials from the FBI, Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) were all in the building at this point. The caller also warned that if anyone cared about what was being shredded they needed to check the dumpster before its collected on 8 am the following Monday. So was that dumpster checked? Nope. Instead, at 11 am Monday, the OIG also got an email from a corrections officer warning again warning about the unusually large number of trash backs at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC)‘s back gate. It’s not clear if it was the same corrections officer behind both calls. But what is clear is that investigators utterly failed to respond to these warnings in time.

Another significant, and rather ‘irregular’, decision that was made very early on in this obstruction of justice investigation was the decision to change the investigation from being an FBI criminal investigation into an OIG matter. Notably, the OIG does not have the power to criminally prosecute and would have to refer its findings to the DOJ for possible prosecutions. No explanation for the hand off to the OIG has been provided.

And it gets worse. The evening of that Monday, August 19, an assistant federal prosecutor sent an email requesting permission to interview the inmate who was involved with the mass shredding operation. The prosecutor added, “We are also investigating any efforts, following Epstein’s death, to obstruct justice by destroying relevant records at MCC. In particular, we learned today that all institutional count slips prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently “missing.”” Yes, apparently ALL of the MCC’s count slips prior to day of Epstein’s death suddenly went missing despite the fact that the investigators requested them on August 12. And this was known by investigators within a week of that request. The destruction of documents was already underway and it wasn’t a secret. That’s part of the corrupt context of reality that Epstein’s death was treated as a suicide right from the start. The evidence of obstruction of justice was there was the start too. Also keep in mind that the two prison guards on duty in Epstein’s wing the night of his death, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were initially criminally charged with obstruction of justice, in part, over their falsification of the routine prisoner counts during the welfare checks they were supposed to have done throughout the evening of Epstein’s death. They were offered a plea deal but turned that down. Their charges were eventually dropped. So we have to wonder if destruction of ALL institutional count slips was part of an early attempt to coverup Noel’s and Thomas’s fraudulent record-keeping or if there was an even bigger institutional count slip scandal that was being protected.

The next day, on August 20, the inmate who was tasked with the assisting in the shredding of the documents, Steven Lopez, was interviewed by OIG agents for roughly 15 minutes. Incredibly, one report suggests that a prison lieutenant whose name is redacted may have been present during Lopez’s interview. Worse, Lopez was never asked to explain what he witnessed. Instead, the questions asked of Lopez were simple “yes”/“no” questions like “Do you have any information about shredding documents?” or “Did you overhear anyone talk about shredding documents?” Lopez gave basically no useful information and the investigators concluded that “Lopez had no other information relating to Epstein or the tip and informed that he is just trying to stay out of trouble, keep his head down and do his work. Lopez informed that he enjoyed the position he has and doesn’t want to screw it up in any way.” The interview wasn’t actually transcribed for four months, and the original handwritten notes are not included in the report. So while we can’t conclude with confidence what exactly Lopez told investigators, we can be pretty confident the investigators weren’t actually interested in getting to the bottom of this shredding mystery in the first place.

Eight days later, on August 28, the guard who sent the email about the shredding, officer Michael Kearins, was brought in for questioning by the OIG. Kearins informed them he worked for the BOP for 30 years and recounted what he heard and saw, including Lopez telling him “they are shredding everything back there.” Kearins also recount how Lopez described one of the men involved with the shredding as white with a Southern accent. Kearins didn’t know anyone at the prison who fit that description, leading him to surmise that the man must have been part of the BOP’s After Action team called in following Epstein’s death.

The next day, on August 29, a memo was issued by investigators closing the case, noting that Kearins had a reputation for filing unfounded complaints. There’s no evidence the investigators ever looked at any video of the outside of the prison, which would have presumably proven or refuted what Kearins claimed to have witnessed. There’s also no indication any members of the BOP’s After Action team were interviewed. Intriguingly, while we don’t know for certain if the people who ordered this shredding were part of the BOP’s After Action team, that team did eventually release its own 18-page report on the Epstein death. So it’s possible, and perhaps likely, the same team that ordered the mass shredding also wrote the BOP’s own after action report. Which makes sense since that would presumably be the same team leading the coverup on behalf of the BOP. Plenty to cover up, after all.

Then there’s the update we got on the investigation into the two guards, Noel and Thomas, and the very intriguing financial ‘irregularities’ investigators uncovered. It turns out Noel’s bank statements indicate multiple large cash deposits in 2019, with the bulk made during the time Epstein was in the MCC. Keep in mind Epstein was sent to the MCC on July 6 and was allegedly found dead just over a month later. So the fact that the bulk of these cash deposits happened during that month is rather notable. But, again, despite turning down a plea deal, the charges against Noel and Thomas were eventually just dropped in exchange for their cooperation, with the result that, when they did eventually get testimonies from Noel and Thomas, it was two years later and many details were seemingly forgotten.

And as we’re going to see, there’s one more investigation that somehow made it into the OIG’s monthly reports on the Epstein investigation for entirely unclear reasons: an investigation into corrections officer who was accused of extorting a woman in a blackmail-for-sex scheme. The guard was on duty the night of Epstein’s death but that’s apparently the extent of the connection to the Epstein case. We are told the guard, Robert C. Adams, had been harassing female visitors to the prison and, in early July 2019, found that a female visitor had smuggled drugs into the prison. Keep in mind that early July is when Epstein first arrived at the prison. Adams is alleged to have told her that he wouldn’t report her if she had sex with him, which did end up happening. This is a good time to recall how we were told that several prisoners in the SHU where Epstein was housed told investigators they were using drugs inside their cells, including marijuana and K2, a synthetic cannabinoid. Was this visitor caught bringing drugs into the SHU and was Epstein a recipient of those drugs? We have no idea. All we know is the OIG decided to include this in their Epstein-related investigation for some mysterious reason. Months were spent on this investigation and reams of collected evidence showed up in the monthly reports. Adams was indicted on charges of bribery and blackmail and found not guilty by a jury.

That’s the predictably troubling and farcical update we just got from the Miami Herald. It’s not the first time we’ve received a report about the OIG’s corrupt handling of the Epstein case. And likely won’t be the last time...unless this happens to be the last update we get. Because with each update, it becomes a bigger, more corrupt farce. Over and over:

Miami Herald

Exclusive: Bags of shredded documents at NY jail after Epstein’s death, officer tells FBI

By Julie K. Brown and Claire Healy
Updated March 21, 2026 10:07 AM

Less than a week after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, something was afoot inside an office where the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ After Action Team had set up a probe into what had happened to their most high-profile inmate.

The FBI was told that there were people shredding documents. Bags of them.

An inmate at the jail was ordered to take the bags of shredded material to MCC’s rear gate and throw them in a dumpster on Thursday, Aug. 15, and again on Friday, Aug. 16, days after Epstein’s Aug. 10 death, records show. The sheer volume of material seemed unusual, the inmate noted.

“They are shredding everything,” the inmate told one of the guards, adding that he was asked to give the officials, whom he did not recognize, a hand with the shredding.

...

The inmate wasn’t the only one who found it out of the ordinary. A corrections officer at the detention facility called the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center that same night, a Friday, at 6:28 p.m. to report that he had “never seen this amount of bags of shredded documents coming out to be put in the dumpster at the rear gate of MCC.”

A back gate corrections officer was also troubled by what he witnessed as the inmate brought down “bales” of shredded paper, according to a memo he wrote to investigators three days later, on Monday, Aug. 19.

“I believe that this conduct may be inappropriate for [an] investigative team to be shredding paperwork related to the investigation and you may want to investigate why BOP employees are destroying records,” the correctional officer wrote on Aug. 19 around 11 a.m.

“Can we take a look at the Dumpster ASAP to see if the paper is still there? Possible they didn’t dump it yet,” replied one of the federal agents whose name is redacted in the memo.

But it was already too late. The trash was picked up that very morning.

By that time, federal prosecutors had also found something else amiss: “We learned today that all institutional count slips for dates prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently ‘missing.’”

The discovery was only one of many suspicious events that unfolded in the days and weeks both before – and after – Epstein’s death, the Miami Herald has found from an analysis of thousands of pages of documents released by the Justice Department. In fact, there were so many irregularities discovered at the Manhattan jail that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) opened three separate probes into the case, with different case numbers, records and emails show.

First, there was the probe into Epstein’s death, which the medical examiner concluded was a suicide by hanging. Despite the ruling, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s estate disputes the finding by Dr. Barbara Sampson, who was then the chief medical examiner of the City of New York.

Dr. Michael Baden, also a former New York City chief medical examiner, argued that the injuries found in Epstein’s neck and the ruptured capillaries in his eyes were more consistent with strangulation than suicide by hanging.

Baden served for decades as a member of the New York State Correction Medical Review Board, an entity responsible for reviewing deaths of inmates in custody. Baden has conducted more than 20,000 autopsies including reviewing those of former President John F. Kennedy, and civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.

But there were also two corruption probes associated with Epstein’s death: one, an obstruction-of-justice case involving the shredding of documents and possible charges of dereliction of duty and other misconduct by correctional officers; and second, a blackmail-for-sex scheme involving a correctional officer that the DOJ labeled a “Color of Law” probe.

That investigation grew out of inmate and correctional officer interviews in the aftermath of Epstein’s death. It’s not clear why it was attached to Epstein’s case. The Herald could find no connection.

What stands out, however, is that at some point early on, the cases seem to have changed hands from being an FBI criminal case — to matters that were handled by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has no criminal prosecution powers. The OIG is an independent agency that investigates allegations of fraud, waste or misconduct, but it must refer its findings to the DOJ for potential prosecution.

The reason for the OIG taking over the probes isn’t entirely clear. From the outset, on the day Epstein’s body was found, then-Attorney General William Barr immediately announced that Epstein died of an “apparent suicide.” And then, six days later, on Aug. 16, Sampson confirmed the suicide ruling.

With the cause and manner of death already determined, and no foul play suspected, the only aspects of the case left unresolved – at least in the eyes of the Justice Department – was whether the actions of any of the officers contributed to Epstein’s suicide.

This seemed to color the investigation almost from the beginning, since Epstein’s death was never treated as suspicious. As a result, his cell was never considered a possible crime scene that would, under normal circumstances, be examined by experienced criminal and forensic experts who would take fingerprints, blood samples and other evidence. One thing that got lost as a result of the cell not being examined was that the piece of fabric that Epstein allegedly used to hang himself was never identified.

It also should have been looked at carefully because on July 23 — just 18 days before he died — Epstein was found unconscious on the floor of his cell. He initially told prison officials that his cellmate, Nick Tartaglione, had tried to kill him and that Tartaglione, a quadruple killer, had been threatening and extorting him. Tartagione denied he tried to harm Epstein, and Epstein later said he couldn’t recall what happened.

Prison officials concluded it was an attempted suicide. Still, the fact that Epstein had reported being threatened by inmates should have been enough for the DOJ to treat his death as suspicious.

...

Separately, the Herald also found that the federal Bureau of Prisons wrote an “After Action Review” of Epstein’s suicide on Aug. 10, 2019. This 18-page report was conducted by an “After Action Review Team,” whose names are redacted from the report. This is likely the team that was in the prison in the days following Epstein’s death. The report refers to a review of “written documentation, electronic databases and limited staff conversations.”

The BOP said in a statement that the team is standard following prison suicides.

...

First call about documents being shredded

The first mention of document shredding was a call to the FBI’s Threat Operations Center from a corrections officer at 6:28 p.m. on Aug. 16, six days after his death. An FBI 302 form containing an interview with the officer noted that “Caller found it suspicious that an after-action team charged with investigating would be shredding huge amounts of paperwork” with all the officials from the FBI, BOP and OIG in the building.

The caller advised that if “anyone cares about what was shredded,” they needed to check the dumpster before it was collected at 8 a.m. on Monday. But that doesn’t appear to have happened.

Instead, about 11 a.m. Monday, a corrections officer wrote an email to the OIG reporting the shredding said that it appeared to be an unusually large number of trash bags at MCC’s back gate. It’s not clear whether the officer was the same one who had called on Friday.

Later that day, at about 7:30 p.m., an assistant federal prosecutor requested permission to interview the inmate who was identified as dumping the material. In the email, the prosecutor notes, “We are also investigating any efforts, following Epstein’s death, to obstruct justice by destroying relevant records at MCC. In particular, we learned today that all institutional count slips prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently “missing.”

Two correctional officers on duty the night Epstein died, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were both interviewed in 2021 by the OIG. Both were questioned about whether they knew anything about Epstein’s “missing” MCC file.

“Did you ever remove or destroy any of Epstein’s paperwork?” the OIG agent asked Noel and Thomas in each of their interviews. Both replied, “no.”

The inmate who was identified as removing the shredded documents was interviewed by OIG agents on Aug. 20. One report indicated that a prison lieutenant whose name is redacted may have been present during the time the inmate was questioned. It was clear from the transcribed interview, however, that the inmate was concerned about whether he would face retaliation for talking about what he saw.

The inmate’s interview was not transcribed until four months later, on Dec. 19, 2019, and the original handwritten notes are not included in the report. The interview was 15 minutes.

The inmate, Steven Lopez, did not explain what he saw, and the agents didn’t ask.

Instead, they gave Lopez questions that he could respond with either yes or no answers.

“Do you have any information about shredding documents?”

Lopez: “No.”

“Did you overhear anyone talk about shredding documents?”

Lopez: “No.”

“Do you know what, if any documents were shredded?”

Lopez: “No idea what if anything was shredded, just did usual trash bin runs.”

The report ended with the statement: “Lopez had no other information relating to Epstein or the tip and informed that he is just trying to stay out of trouble, keep his head down and do his work. Lopez informed that he enjoyed the position he has and doesn’t want to screw it up in any way.”

Eight days later, the corrections officer who sent the email to the FBI was interviewed. While his name is redacted in the interview, an email sent days later identifies the complainant as officer Michael Kearins, and a subpoena for Kearins by OIG agents is included in the files. He said he had been working for BOP for almost 30 years. He admitted he sent the email and provided a first-hand account of what he heard and saw, records show.

According to the report, Kearins said that about 10:30 a.m on Aug. 15, Lopez approached the post at the rear gate at MCC with approximately three bags of shredded paper. Kearins recalled that Lopez said “they are shredding everything back there.”

According to Kearins, Lopez described one of the men involved in the shredding as white, with a Southern accent. Kearins said he didn’t know anyone at the prison who fit that description, so he surmised that he must have been part of the BOP’s After Action team related to Epstein’s death.

Lopez told him that the man ordered him to “make sure you get that box over there too.” Kearins said that another inmate (whose name is redacted) was also asked to help shred the documents. Kearins admitted he did not know what documents were being shredded or where they originated.

...

The case closing memo, issued on Aug. 29, noted that the corrections officer had a reputation for filing unfounded complaints.

“Inmate Lopez was previously interviewed on 08/21/2019. Due to no evidence to support the complaint, FBI NY will be closing this matter,” the memo said.

...

Anonymous letter

A corrections officer wrote an anonymous letter to a federal judge sometime later. The date stamp on the envelope is illegible, but it appears to have been sent after the FBI interviewed Kearins and Lopez. The writer implies that the “government” is covering up the destruction of the records.

“I do not feel comfortable reporting this to OIG because OIG knows about this and may be covering it all up,” the writer said.

There is no indication from the Epstein files whether the FBI, the federal prosecutors or the OIG took further action on the shredding. There is also no indication they looked at video from outside the prison or whether any members of BOP’s After Action Team was interviewed.

The two officers on duty the night Epstein died, Noel and Thomas, were ultimately criminally indicted for falsifying their inmate counts and failing to make the required 30-minute checks during their overnight shift.

But it would be two years before the officers were formally interviewed by OIG investigators. Those lengthy interviews showed that their memories had faded, and that at times, they couldn’t recall or provided conflicting statements about the sequence of events that night. Their answers didn’t seem to raise any flags with OIG investigators.

But their charges were quietly nolle prosed, or dropped, in December 2021 with little explanation, other than it was part of a deferred prosecution in which both guards complied with community service and other terms that were not publicly specified.

Both guards never returned to work and were fired.

Cash deposits suspicious, bank says

Banking records for three corrections officers were subpoenaed by federal investigators for Thomas, Noel and an operations lieutenant, Glenda Anderson-Layne. The Herald could not find Thomas’ or Anderson-Layne’s bank records in the files. DOJ’s Epstein library did contain Noel’s bank and credit union statements and Anderson-Layne’s credit card statements.

...

It’s not clear what, if anything, investigators concluded by reviewing their financial statements. Noel’s bank statements show thousands of dollars in cash deposits, some of which her bank, JP Morgan Chase, flagged as suspicious. She also leased a new 2019 LandRover, valued at $63,000 in January 2019.

Her salary, according to the loan application, was listed as $130,000 a year. She also had numerous anonymous or redacted Zelle and other cash app deposits to her checking account, sometimes thousands of dollars at a time.

Many of the deposits preceded Epstein’s incarceration at MCC. But the bulk of the deposits, including a $5,000 cash deposit on July 30, were made during the time Epstein was housed at the prison.

Investigators probing Epstein’s death discovered that one of the corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died, Robert C. Adams, had been harassing the female visitors to the prison. In early July, Adams found that a female visitor had smuggled drugs into the prison. Adams allegedly told her that he wouldn’t report her if she had sex with him, court records show.

The investigation lasted several months – as federal authorities confirmed through cell phone records and surveillance video that the female visitor met Adams at a local pizza shop where he took her to the Hutchinson motel in Brooklyn and the two had sex, according to court records.

Adams was indicted on charges of bribery and blackmail, but was found not guilty following a trial by jury. He is no longer employed by the BOP, prison officials confirmed.

It’s not clear why the case – including the reams of evidence collected – was included in monthly updates with the Epstein death investigation.

Despite a pervasive culture of smuggling drugs, cell phones and other contraband into the prison previously reported by the Herald and other media and despite the bank flagging a guard’s deposits, neither Noel nor Thomas were asked about their financial records during the OIG interviews.

Note: This story was written with the help of the search database Sourcebase.ai.

This story was originally published March 21, 2026 at 5:30 AM.

———–

“The discovery was only one of many suspicious events that unfolded in the days and weeks both before – and after – Epstein’s death, the Miami Herald has found from an analysis of thousands of pages of documents released by the Justice Department. In fact, there were so many irregularities discovered at the Manhattan jail that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) opened three separate probes into the case, with different case numbers, records and emails show.”

There were so many ‘irregularities’ found that three separate probes were opened by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). The lack of any prosecutions over all these ‘irregularities’ wasn’t due to a lack of awareness by the investigative authorities. They investigated. It’s just that no one was ever charged. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised to find that these probes into the irregularities turned out to be rather irregular themselves. Starting with the probe into Epstein’s highly ‘irregular’ death, which resulted in the official conclusion of suicide quickly arrived at by the then-chief medical examiner of the City of New York, Dr. Barbara Sampson. A conclusion directly contradicted by Dr. Michael Baden who was hired by Mark Epstein. Recall how Mark Epstein asserted that Sampson never actually inspected his brother’s body herself, with Kristen Roman, a medical examiner for the city of New York, doing the actual autopsy. Of course, given Baden’s history of highly suspect forensic conclusions, most notably the JFK single bullet theory, it’s hard to know how to interpret the role Baden is playing here. But it’s also not as if we are reliant on Baden’s testimony when it comes to the question of whether or not we’re looking at a cover up. The whole situation screams cover up, starting with the fact that the investigation into Epstein’s death was never treated as suspicious from the very beginning, leading to a lack of basic evidentiary protocols like the taking of fingerprints or blood samples. Of course, the malpractice went way beyond not collecting evidence and included the staging of evidence in a different cell.

Similarly, when we see how investigators seemed to arrive at an immediate ‘suicide’ conclusion despite the incident just 18 days earlier when Epstein was found semi-conscious and initially blamed it on an attack from his then then-cellmate, former police officer Nicholas Tartaglione. Epstein was put on suicide watch ad given a new cellmate, Efrain Reyes, per suicide watch protocol. But on August 9, 2019, the day before Epstein was found dead, Reyes was released. Epstein was told to expect a new cellmate but never got one. And Epstein had been inexplicably taken off suicide watch just a few days before, outraging prison experts when first reported. Also recall what Ed Opperman brought up during his second Patreon talk with Dave about the Epstein files: Reyes died of COVID in November 2020, making the last cellmate someone who can no longer be questioned:

...
First, there was the probe into Epstein’s death, which the medical examiner concluded was a suicide by hanging. Despite the ruling, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s estate disputes the finding by Dr. Barbara Sampson, who was then the chief medical examiner of the City of New York.

Dr. Michael Baden, also a former New York City chief medical examiner, argued that the injuries found in Epstein’s neck and the ruptured capillaries in his eyes were more consistent with strangulation than suicide by hanging.

Baden served for decades as a member of the New York State Correction Medical Review Board, an entity responsible for reviewing deaths of inmates in custody. Baden has conducted more than 20,000 autopsies including reviewing those of former President John F. Kennedy, and civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.

...

With the cause and manner of death already determined, and no foul play suspected, the only aspects of the case left unresolved – at least in the eyes of the Justice Department – was whether the actions of any of the officers contributed to Epstein’s suicide.

This seemed to color the investigation almost from the beginning, since Epstein’s death was never treated as suspicious. As a result, his cell was never considered a possible crime scene that would, under normal circumstances, be examined by experienced criminal and forensic experts who would take fingerprints, blood samples and other evidence. One thing that got lost as a result of the cell not being examined was that the piece of fabric that Epstein allegedly used to hang himself was never identified.

It also should have been looked at carefully because on July 23 — just 18 days before he died — Epstein was found unconscious on the floor of his cell. He initially told prison officials that his cellmate, Nick Tartaglione, had tried to kill him and that Tartaglione, a quadruple killer, had been threatening and extorting him. Tartagione denied he tried to harm Epstein, and Epstein later said he couldn’t recall what happened.

Prison officials concluded it was an attempted suicide. Still, the fact that Epstein had reported being threatened by inmates should have been enough for the DOJ to treat his death as suspicious.
...

And then there’s the two ‘corruption’ probes. One probe into the possible obstruction-of-justice over the shredding over documents. And then a second probe involving a blackmail-for-sex scheme involving a correctional officer that appears to really just be tangentially related the Epstein case. Notably, these probes appear to have started off as FBI criminal cases but, early on, changed hand to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has no criminal prosecution powers. Given that there’s no obvious reason given for this hand off, it’s hard not to suspect that this isn’t another ‘irregularity’ with the execution of these ‘irregularity’ probes:

...
But there were also two corruption probes associated with Epstein’s death: one, an obstruction-of-justice case involving the shredding of documents and possible charges of dereliction of duty and other misconduct by correctional officers; and second, a blackmail-for-sex scheme involving a correctional officer that the DOJ labeled a “Color of Law” probe.

That investigation grew out of inmate and correctional officer interviews in the aftermath of Epstein’s death. It’s not clear why it was attached to Epstein’s case. The Herald could find no connection.

What stands out, however, is that at some point early on, the cases seem to have changed hands from being an FBI criminal case — to matters that were handled by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has no criminal prosecution powers. The OIG is an independent agency that investigates allegations of fraud, waste or misconduct, but it must refer its findings to the DOJ for potential prosecution.

The reason for the OIG taking over the probes isn’t entirely clear. From the outset, on the day Epstein’s body was found, then-Attorney General William Barr immediately announced that Epstein died of an “apparent suicide.” And then, six days later, on Aug. 16, Sampson confirmed the suicide ruling.
...

And that brings us to the highly irregular interview of the prisoner, Steven Lopez, about the large volume of paper shredding he was involved with on August 15 and 16, less than a week after Epstein’s death. Notably, Lopez did not recognize the officials who asked for Lopez’s assistance, suggesting that the officials who ordered the shredding where part of an outside team that was brought in in the wake of Epstein’s death. But even more notably, we learn that the interview of Lopez by OIG agents on August 20 took place with a prison lieutenant possibly present during the questioning! And then the interview wasn’t even transcribed for four months, with the original handwritten notes not included in the report. Again, it just screams coverup:

...
The FBI was told that there were people shredding documents. Bags of them.

An inmate at the jail was ordered to take the bags of shredded material to MCC’s rear gate and throw them in a dumpster on Thursday, Aug. 15, and again on Friday, Aug. 16, days after Epstein’s Aug. 10 death, records show. The sheer volume of material seemed unusual, the inmate noted.

“They are shredding everything,” the inmate told one of the guards, adding that he was asked to give the officials, whom he did not recognize, a hand with the shredding.

...

The inmate who was identified as removing the shredded documents was interviewed by OIG agents on Aug. 20. One report indicated that a prison lieutenant whose name is redacted may have been present during the time the inmate was questioned. It was clear from the transcribed interview, however, that the inmate was concerned about whether he would face retaliation for talking about what he saw.

The inmate’s interview was not transcribed until four months later, on Dec. 19, 2019, and the original handwritten notes are not included in the report. The interview was 15 minutes.
...

Beyond that, the questions Lopez was asked were so narrow and specific it’s as if the questioners were trying to avoid getting finding anything in the first place:

...
The inmate, Steven Lopez, did not explain what he saw, and the agents didn’t ask.

Instead, they gave Lopez questions that he could respond with either yes or no answers.

“Do you have any information about shredding documents?”

Lopez: “No.”

“Did you overhear anyone talk about shredding documents?”

Lopez: “No.”

“Do you know what, if any documents were shredded?”

Lopez: “No idea what if anything was shredded, just did usual trash bin runs.”

The report ended with the statement: “Lopez had no other information relating to Epstein or the tip and informed that he is just trying to stay out of trouble, keep his head down and do his work. Lopez informed that he enjoyed the position he has and doesn’t want to screw it up in any way.”
...

But it wasn’t the inmate who first notified authorities about the anomalous shredding going on. That first call came from a corrections officer who called the FBI’s Threat Operations Center on August 16, warning that they needed to check the dumpster if “anyone cares about what was shredded.” No one checked. Instead, the following Monday, another email was written to the OIG by a corrections officer, possibly the same one, about the unusually large number of trash bags at the back gate. Later that day, prosecutors finally request an interview with Lopez, noting that an obstruction of justice investigation was opened after learning that “all institutional count slips prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently “missing.””:

...
First call about documents being shredded

The first mention of document shredding was a call to the FBI’s Threat Operations Center from a corrections officer at 6:28 p.m. on Aug. 16, six days after his death. An FBI 302 form containing an interview with the officer noted that “Caller found it suspicious that an after-action team charged with investigating would be shredding huge amounts of paperwork” with all the officials from the FBI, BOP and OIG in the building.

The caller advised that if “anyone cares about what was shredded,” they needed to check the dumpster before it was collected at 8 a.m. on Monday. But that doesn’t appear to have happened.

Instead, about 11 a.m. Monday, a corrections officer wrote an email to the OIG reporting the shredding said that it appeared to be an unusually large number of trash bags at MCC’s back gate. It’s not clear whether the officer was the same one who had called on Friday.

Later that day, at about 7:30 p.m., an assistant federal prosecutor requested permission to interview the inmate who was identified as dumping the material. In the email, the prosecutor notes, “We are also investigating any efforts, following Epstein’s death, to obstruct justice by destroying relevant records at MCC. In particular, we learned today that all institutional count slips prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently “missing.”
...

Eight days later, presumably August 28, 2019, the corrections officer who sent the initial warning, Michael Kearins, if finally interviewed. According to Kearins, Lopez recounted to him how one the men involved with the shredding, a white man with a Southern accent, didn’t match anyone Kearins knew at the prison, further suggesting that the shredding was ordered by an outside team brought in following Epstein’s death. On August 29, the case was closed, with investigators seemingly dismissing Kearins’s warnings by asserting that he had a reputation for filing unfounded complaints. Another noteworthy wrinkle in that closing memo is the fact that it refers to Lopez being interviewed of August 21, when records indicate that was August 20. While that’s possibly just a minor error, the fact that that Lopez’s interview wasn’t transcribed for four months and the original notes weren’t included in the report raises the question of whether or not mis-recording the date of that interview somehow bureaucratically facilitated the eventual obstruction of what Lopez really told them:

...
Eight days later, the corrections officer who sent the email to the FBI was interviewed. While his name is redacted in the interview, an email sent days later identifies the complainant as officer Michael Kearins, and a subpoena for Kearins by OIG agents is included in the files. He said he had been working for BOP for almost 30 years. He admitted he sent the email and provided a first-hand account of what he heard and saw, records show.

According to the report, Kearins said that about 10:30 a.m on Aug. 15, Lopez approached the post at the rear gate at MCC with approximately three bags of shredded paper. Kearins recalled that Lopez said “they are shredding everything back there.”

According to Kearins, Lopez described one of the men involved in the shredding as white, with a Southern accent. Kearins said he didn’t know anyone at the prison who fit that description, so he surmised that he must have been part of the BOP’s After Action team related to Epstein’s death.

Lopez told him that the man ordered him to “make sure you get that box over there too.” Kearins said that another inmate (whose name is redacted) was also asked to help shred the documents. Kearins admitted he did not know what documents were being shredded or where they originated.

...

The case closing memo, issued on Aug. 29, noted that the corrections officer had a reputation for filing unfounded complaints.

“Inmate Lopez was previously interviewed on 08/21/2019. Due to no evidence to support the complaint, FBI NY will be closing this matter,” the memo said.

...

There is no indication from the Epstein files whether the FBI, the federal prosecutors or the OIG took further action on the shredding. There is also no indication they looked at video from outside the prison or whether any members of BOP’s After Action Team was interviewed.
...

Intriguingly, it also turns out that the federal Bureau of Prisons wrote an 18-page “After Action Review” of its own, conducted by an “After Action Review Team,” whose names are redacted. This is likely the team that was at the prison in the days following Epstein’s death, suggesting that this might be the team that ordered the shredding. Yes, the “After Action Review Team” is likely the one responsible for the obstruction of justice:

...
Separately, the Herald also found that the federal Bureau of Prisons wrote an “After Action Review” of Epstein’s suicide on Aug. 10, 2019. This 18-page report was conducted by an “After Action Review Team,” whose names are redacted from the report. This is likely the team that was in the prison in the days following Epstein’s death. The report refers to a review of “written documentation, electronic databases and limited staff conversations.”

The BOP said in a statement that the team is standard following prison suicides.
...

And then we get to the investigation into Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, the two correctional officers on duty the night of Epstein’s death. As we saw, the pair were facing a criminal investigation over the falsification of records and conspiring to interfere with the functions of the federal prison. As we also saw, not only were the criminal charges against Noel and Thomas eventually dropped, apparently in exchange for their cooperation in the investigation, but the OIG’s report on the matter contained an apparent mistake that happened to conceal evidence that directly contradicted statements by Noel. And now we’re learning that both Noel and Thomas were question about Epstein’s “missing” MCC file. So it would appear the destruction of paperwork about Epstein is very much a part of this story, which makes the lack of concern about the mass paper shredding all the more ‘irregular’:

...
Two correctional officers on duty the night Epstein died, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were both interviewed in 2021 by the OIG. Both were questioned about whether they knew anything about Epstein’s “missing” MCC file.

“Did you ever remove or destroy any of Epstein’s paperwork?” the OIG agent asked Noel and Thomas in each of their interviews. Both replied, “no.”

...

The two officers on duty the night Epstein died, Noel and Thomas, were ultimately criminally indicted for falsifying their inmate counts and failing to make the required 30-minute checks during their overnight shift.

But it would be two years before the officers were formally interviewed by OIG investigators. Those lengthy interviews showed that their memories had faded, and that at times, they couldn’t recall or provided conflicting statements about the sequence of events that night. Their answers didn’t seem to raise any flags with OIG investigators.

But their charges were quietly nolle prosed, or dropped, in December 2021 with little explanation, other than it was part of a deferred prosecution in which both guards complied with community service and other terms that were not publicly specified.

Both guards never returned to work and were fired.
...

But the questions about Noel and Thomas aren’t just about destruction of evidence and falsification of records. It turns out Noel’s bank statements indicate multiple large cash deposits in 2019, with the bulk made during the time Epstein was in the MCC. Keep in mind Epstein only spent about a month there, so the timing is pretty remarkable:

...
Banking records for three corrections officers were subpoenaed by federal investigators for Thomas, Noel and an operations lieutenant, Glenda Anderson-Layne. The Herald could not find Thomas’ or Anderson-Layne’s bank records in the files. DOJ’s Epstein library did contain Noel’s bank and credit union statements and Anderson-Layne’s credit card statements.

...

It’s not clear what, if anything, investigators concluded by reviewing their financial statements. Noel’s bank statements show thousands of dollars in cash deposits, some of which her bank, JP Morgan Chase, flagged as suspicious. She also leased a new 2019 LandRover, valued at $63,000 in January 2019.

Her salary, according to the loan application, was listed as $130,000 a year. She also had numerous anonymous or redacted Zelle and other cash app deposits to her checking account, sometimes thousands of dollars at a time.

Many of the deposits preceded Epstein’s incarceration at MCC. But the bulk of the deposits, including a $5,000 cash deposit on July 30, were made during the time Epstein was housed at the prison.

...

Despite a pervasive culture of smuggling drugs, cell phones and other contraband into the prison previously reported by the Herald and other media and despite the bank flagging a guard’s deposits, neither Noel nor Thomas were asked about their financial records during the OIG interviews.
...

Lastly, there’s the bizarre sex-for-blackmail investigation that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Epstein case at all beyond the fact that correction officer accused of the extortion was on duty the night Epstein died. Is there are connection we aren’t told about? It was the case that inmates in Epstein’s win recounted how marijuana and synthetic cannabinoids were used in the wing. Was Epstein possibly the recipient of the drugs that were smuggled into the prison by a female visitor? And what does any of this have to do with an investigation into Epstein’s death?

...
Investigators probing Epstein’s death discovered that one of the corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died, Robert C. Adams, had been harassing the female visitors to the prison. In early July, Adams found that a female visitor had smuggled drugs into the prison. Adams allegedly told her that he wouldn’t report her if she had sex with him, court records show.

The investigation lasted several months – as federal authorities confirmed through cell phone records and surveillance video that the female visitor met Adams at a local pizza shop where he took her to the Hutchinson motel in Brooklyn and the two had sex, according to court records.

Adams was indicted on charges of bribery and blackmail, but was found not guilty following a trial by jury. He is no longer employed by the BOP, prison officials confirmed.

It’s not clear why the case – including the reams of evidence collected – was included in monthly updates with the Epstein death investigation.
...

While it remains entirely unclear why this blackmail-for-sex investigation was included in the monthly updates on the Epstein death, it’s rather notable that months were spent investigating these allegations while so many of the blatant acts of fraud by the official investigators were casually dismissed. But, hey, at least something was actually investigated.

This time, the update involves a story that first briefly popped up in February of 2023. A story that wasn’t clearly Epstein-related at the time: a hacker broke into the FBI’s computer networks in an incident that was described as isolated and contained at the time of the report. Ominously, we were told that FBI officials believe it involved computers at its New York office which were used to investigate child sexual exploitation. And that’s all we were told about the incident.

Then, last week, we got an update: the hacker “compromised” Epstein investigation files. We don’t know how exactly the files were compromised, but that’s the language used in a report based on an unnamed source familiar with the matter. We’re also told the FBI has determined that the hacker was a foreign cybercriminal, and not some state-sponsored hacker.

The hack apparently happened as a result of a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI’s New York Field Office being vulnerable by Special Agent Aaron Spivak, although Spivak apparently told FBI investigators that he is being made into a scapegoat and that conflicting bureau policies and faulty guidance around information technology were to blame. Intriguingly, Spivak’s name actually appears in at least two of the released Epstein files, and in one of those files his name is the only name not redacted. A second document lists Spivak as one of the recipients of an email sent on August 6, 2019, just a few days before Epstein’s ‘suicide’, to a number of members of the NYPD and FBI inquiring about their availability for a federal raid on ‘Epstein Island’ in a few days. So Special Agent Spivak may have been one of the participants of that initial raid, and now he’s claiming to be the scapegoat for this cyberintrusion in the ‘compromising’ of some of the Epstein files.

But, again, we still have zero details on how many files were ‘compromised’ or the nature of the ‘compromising’ act. Were files altered? Deleted? A ransomware attack that encrypted the files until a payment was received? Or was simply be viewed by the hacker a form of ‘compromise’? We have no idea. And it appears we shouldn’t expect additional details any time soon because the FBI claims the investigation is ongoing, three years later, and therefore they can’t comment on the story.

And now we get to the wild twist in this story regarding what the hacker allegedly did: we are told the hacker found images of child abuse on the server and left a message in a text file on Agent Spivak’s computer that the hacker was disgusted by what they discovered and was going to turn them over to the FBI. Yep. We’re told FBI agents managed to convince the hacker to join a video chat where they flashed their FBI badges in order to convince the hacker that they really were the FBI. We’re given no details on what, if any, additional steps the FBI has taken against this hacker.

Now, the fact that the hacker allegedly left a note threatening to turn the victim over to the FBI would seem to indicate that the hacker had no idea about the owner of the server when they initiated the hack. Which isn’t an inconceivable scenario, especially if Agent Spivak really did leave the FBI’s server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab vulnerable in a way that was obvious to hackers that are routinely scanning the internet looking for vulnerable networks to exploit. It’s hard to rule out such a scenario given the lack of details we have on the nature of the exploit. And if the hacker really was attempting to extort some sort of payment, threatening to turn them over to the FBI makes sense as a tactic for extorting their victim.

But when we discover that files have been mysteriously compromised in one of the most sensitive investigations of the modern era, also keep in mind that leaving that note threatening to turn them over to the FBI would also be a great form of misdirection if we’re looking at a plot to intentionally destroy, or just view, the evidence. And it is rather notable that no other hackers apparently managed to exploit the same vulnerabilities during this period. If this server was just vulnerable to the world for an evening, it’s arguably pretty fortunate there was only one hacker.

And all of those questions about what really happened in this incident bring us to a very remarkable piece of Epstein-adjacent history that just might be a relevant factor in this story: It turns out the US government’s post‑9/11 intelligence and national security efforts to ‘connect the dots’ and prevent the kind of ‘siloing’ of intelligence that was blamed for the 9/11 intelligence failures involved a company with a very interesting pedigree. That company, Chiliad, was co-founded by none other than Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell. And Chiliad’s first big client that showcased the deployment of its software happened to be the FBI, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The company was founded in 1999 and by 2008, Chiliad was already being used extensively by both agencies.

Another notable figure in Chiliad’s leadership is Alan Wade, who served as the CIA’s chief information officer (CIO) from 2001–2005, a period when all sorts of major decisions about how to reorganize the US national security bureaucracy was made. And a period when companies like Palantir and Chiliad made major inroads into this space. Recall how Palantir was founded in 2003 and was invested in by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel in 2005. Wade’s profile on Bloomberg lists him as both the Chairman/Founder of Chiliad. So it would appear Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister Christine co-founded a company with the guy who would become the first post-911 CIA’s CIO and proceeded to be given vast access to the information scattered across federal government agencies. Surprise!

As we’ll see, Chiliad’s approach to ‘connecting the dots’ for the US government focused on creating a kind of virtual search engine scattered across the numerous departments and agencies that comprise the federal government. Chiliad doesn’t create a central searchable repository of files and information. Instead, Chiliad’s software is installed locally on all of the various servers containing the information that might want to be searched, allowing users in one location to query the data stored across all of the locations.

And Chiliad’s software doesn’t just search the structured databases located on all these various government servers. It also potentially allows for the search of ‘unstructured’ data like text files and images. It’s a software solution that makes sense from a ‘connecting the dots’ standpoint, but also implicitly gives Chiliad a kind of God’s Eye view of the where all sorts of information is located across the federal bureaucratic landscape. In other words, if one wanted to find where particular Epstein-related files are located, Chiliad probably knows the answer.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that when we’re talking about software that can take all sorts of disparate data sources and unify them into a single searchable entity, we’re talking about something that sure sounds a lot like the touted capabilities of the powerful PROMIS software that was at the center or ‘The Octopus’ conspiracy at decade earlier. Recall how Ghislaine and Christine’s father, Robert Maxwell, has his own ties to figures closely involved in that story.

That’s all part of the wild update we just got on that mysterious 2023 hacking case. An update so sparse on details that we can’t really say what really happened or whether or not any of the evidence was destroyed, altered, downloaded, or simply viewed. Nor do we know anything about the alleged hacker other than an assertion that they are thought to be a foreign cybercriminal who didn’t realize they had hacked into the FBI’s server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab:

Reuters

FBI investigates hack of its own computer network

By Reuters
February 17, 2023 1:14 PM CST
Updated February 17, 2023

Feb 17 (Reuters) — The FBI is investigating a hack of its computer network, in an isolated incident that was now contained, the agency said on Friday.

“The FBI is aware of the incident and is working to gain additional information,” the agency said in an emailed statement to Reuters, without providing further details.

CNN, which first reported the incident citing people briefed on the matter, said FBI officials believe it involved computers at its New York office which were used to investigate child sexual exploitation.

It was not immediately clear when the incident occurred. One source told CNN the origin of the hack was still being probed.

...

———–

“FBI investigates hack of its own computer network” By Reuters; Reuters; 02/17/2023

“CNN, which first reported the incident citing people briefed on the matter, said FBI officials believe it involved computers at its New York office which were used to investigate child sexual exploitation.”

An isolated, now contained, incident at the FBI’s NYC offices that just happened to involve computers used in child sexual exploitation investigations. That was all we got to learn back in February of 2023. Ominous, but vague. Flash forward three years and the story has suddenly received a very disturbing set of updates. Like the fact that the hacker was apparently disgusted with the child sex images they discovered and left a message on the hacked FBI computer warning them that they were going to turn the owner over to the FBI. We are told the FBI somehow convinced the hacker to join a video chat where the agents flashed their FBI credentials. At the same time, we are also told the hacker “compromised file” related to the Epstein investigation. No further information on the nature of files or how exactly the files were “compromised”, with the FBI citing an ongoing investigation into the hack. The FBI agent whose computer was initially hacked reportedly told the FBI he was being made “a scapegoat for the intrusion” and that conflicting bureau policies and faulty guidance around information technology were to blame:

Reuters

Exclusive: Foreign hacker in 2023 compromised Epstein files held by FBI, source and documents show

By Raphael Satter
March 11, 2026 5:02 AM CDT
Updated March 17, 2026

WASHINGTON, March 11 (Reuters) — A foreign hacker compromised files relating to the FBI’s investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a break-in at the bureau’s New York Field Office three years ago, according to a source familiar with the matter and recently published Justice Department documents reviewed by Reuters.

The details of who accessed a server at the FBI’s New York Field Office, including the allegation that a foreign hacker was involved, are being reported here for the first time.

In a statement, the FBI said what it described as a “cyber incident” was “an isolated one.”

“The FBI restricted access to the malicious actor and rectified the network. The investigation remains ongoing, so we do not have further comments to provide at this time.”

Although the source said the intrusion appeared to have been carried out by a cybercriminal rather than a foreign government, the incident underscores the files’ potential intelligence value, one academic said. The legally mandated publication of U.S. Justice Department documents has exposed the dead financier’s ties to prominent people in politics, finance, academia and business, triggering investigations in numerous countries around the world.

“Who wouldn’t be going after the Epstein files if you’re the Russians or somebody interested in kompromat?” said Jon Lindsay, who researches the role of emerging technology in global security at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If foreign intelligence agencies are not thinking seriously about the Epstein files as a target, then I would be shocked.”

...

FEBRUARY 2023 BREAK-IN

The hack occurred after a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI’s New York Field Office was inadvertently left vulnerable by Special Agent Aaron Spivack, who was trying to navigate the bureau’s complex procedures for handling digital evidence, according to the source and the documents.

A timeline written by Spivack and included in the large cache of Epstein documents released earlier this year said the break-in happened on February 12, 2023. It was discovered the following day when Spivack turned on his computer and discovered a text file warning him that his network had been compromised, according to that document.

Further investigation turned up traces of unusual activity on the server, the document said, adding that the activity “included combing through certain files pertaining to the Epstein investigation.”

The timeline does not say which specific files were accessed, whether the hacker downloaded the data, or who the hacker was. Reuters could not establish what, if any, overlap the affected data had with the Epstein documents published earlier this year or the files that remain under wraps.

Spivack, whose name appears elsewhere in the documents in connection with the Epstein investigation, did not return repeated messages seeking comment. Reuters was unable to reach the man identified in the documents as Spivack’s lawyer, Richard J. Roberson, Jr. Seven FBI agents identified in the documents as being involved in the investigation into the incident did not return messages.

HACKER, FBI CHATTED BY VIDEO

In his statement to FBI investigators examining whether he was responsible for the breach, Spivack said he was being made “a scapegoat for the intrusion” and that conflicting bureau policies and faulty guidance around information technology were to blame. Reuters could not establish the result of the bureau’s internal investigation.

The person familiar with the breach said the intrusion was carried out by a foreign hacker who did not appear to realize they had penetrated a law enforcement server. The hacker expressed disgust at the presence of child abuse images on the device and left a message threatening to turn its owner over to the FBI, the person said.

The source said bureau officials defused the situation by convincing the hacker that they actually were the FBI, in part by having the hacker join a video chat where they flashed their law enforcement credentials in front of a web camera.

Reuters could not determine — and the source said they did not know — who the hacker was, what country they were operating from, what they did with the material accessed, or whether any effort was made to identify or punish them for breaking into the FBI’s server.

...

———

“Exclusive: Foreign hacker in 2023 compromised Epstein files held by FBI, source and documents show” by Raphael Satter; Reuters; 03/11/2026

“A foreign hacker compromised files relating to the FBI’s investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a break-in at the bureau’s New York Field Office three years ago, according to a source familiar with the matter and recently published Justice Department documents reviewed by Reuters.”

The 2023 hack was carried out by a foreign hacker who “compromised files” involving the Epstein investigation. That’s the remarkable update we just got, three years later. But the update gets much weirder. Apparently, this foreign hacker — who was NOT working for a foreign government but just a random cybercriminal — didn’t realize they had hacked into an FBI server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI’s New York Field Office and were outraged when they came across all this child exploitation content. So this hacker leaves a digital note on the hacked device, threatening to turn the owner over to the FBI. Keep in mind that threatening to turn them over to the FBI would be a logical form of leveling a threat of some sort of payment by the victim was desired. Although we aren’t told about any attempt to extort a payment. Eventually, the FBI manages to convince the hacker that it was an FBI server by setting up a video chat where the agents could flash their law enforcement credentials. And yet that narrative we’ve been given — that the hacker didn’t realize they had hacked into an FBI server and seemingly grew outraged after stumbling across child abuse images — is potentially in conflict with the fact that we are also told that the hackers activity “included combing through certain files pertaining to the Epstein investigation.” Were those files purely images or were there other types of documents that would have made it more clear that these were documents related to the Epstein investigation? We have no details, just as we aren’t told at all what was “compromised”. It’s all very vague:

...
Although the source said the intrusion appeared to have been carried out by a cybercriminal rather than a foreign government, the incident underscores the files’ potential intelligence value, one academic said. The legally mandated publication of U.S. Justice Department documents has exposed the dead financier’s ties to prominent people in politics, finance, academia and business, triggering investigations in numerous countries around the world.

“Who wouldn’t be going after the Epstein files if you’re the Russians or somebody interested in kompromat?” said Jon Lindsay, who researches the role of emerging technology in global security at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If foreign intelligence agencies are not thinking seriously about the Epstein files as a target, then I would be shocked.”

...

Further investigation turned up traces of unusual activity on the server, the document said, adding that the activity “included combing through certain files pertaining to the Epstein investigation.”

The timeline does not say which specific files were accessed, whether the hacker downloaded the data, or who the hacker was. Reuters could not establish what, if any, overlap the affected data had with the Epstein documents published earlier this year or the files that remain under wraps.

...

The person familiar with the breach said the intrusion was carried out by a foreign hacker who did not appear to realize they had penetrated a law enforcement server. The hacker expressed disgust at the presence of child abuse images on the device and left a message threatening to turn its owner over to the FBI, the person said.

The source said bureau officials defused the situation by convincing the hacker that they actually were the FBI, in part by having the hacker join a video chat where they flashed their law enforcement credentials in front of a web camera.

Reuters could not determine — and the source said they did not know — who the hacker was, what country they were operating from, what they did with the material accessed, or whether any effort was made to identify or punish them for breaking into the FBI’s server.
...

And then we get to the explanation given by the FBI agent who is being blamed with leaving the FBI’s server vulnerable, apparently while trying to navigate the procedures for handling digital evidence which would have included child abuse images. Special Agent Aaron Spivack, told the FBI investigators that he was being made “a scapegoat for the intrusion” and that conflicting bureau policies and faulty guidance around information technology were to blame. In other words, Spivack seemed to be indicating that he wasn’t hacked due to negligence or a mistake. He was hacked while following protocol, or at least following one of the conflicting protocols. Intriguingly, Spivack’s name shows up in the Epstein files in two notable ways. First, one of those Epstein files appears to be a document listing the names of various special agents who were assigned to day and night shifts for some sort of security detail at a redacted location. In fact, almost everything in that document is redacted except for Agent Spivack’s name. It’s more than a little odd and lends credence to the idea that he’s somehow being made into a scapegoat. Why was his name, and only his name, left unredacted? And then the second document is an August 6, 2019 email, days before Epstein’s ‘suicide’, sent to a group of people, mostly FBI and NYPD email addresses, in forming them that Epstein’s island was about to be raided and asking for their availability to participate in the search of the island. Spivack is one of the email addresses. So it appears Spivack was directly involved with the Epstein investigation, and potentially even involved in the FBI’s search of the island, which makes his claims of being scapegoated all the more intriguing:

...
The hack occurred after a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI’s New York Field Office was inadvertently left vulnerable by Special Agent Aaron Spivack, who was trying to navigate the bureau’s complex procedures for handling digital evidence, according to the source and the documents.

A timeline written by Spivack and included in the large cache of Epstein documents released earlier this year said the break-in happened on February 12, 2023. It was discovered the following day when Spivack turned on his computer and discovered a text file warning him that his network had been compromised, according to that document.

...

Spivack, whose name appears elsewhere in the documents in connection with the Epstein investigation, did not return repeated messages seeking comment. Reuters was unable to reach the man identified in the documents as Spivack’s lawyer, Richard J. Roberson, Jr. Seven FBI agents identified in the documents as being involved in the investigation into the incident did not return messages.

...

In his statement to FBI investigators examining whether he was responsible for the breach, Spivack said he was being made “a scapegoat for the intrusion” and that conflicting bureau policies and faulty guidance around information technology were to blame. Reuters could not establish the result of the bureau’s internal investigation.
...

Also note how part of the explanation for lack of details from the FBI is that the investigation remains ongoing. Three years later. It’s the kind of convenient explanation that is either complete BS or hints at much more damage having been done than we are currently being told about:

...
In a statement, the FBI said what it described as a “cyber incident” was “an isolated one.”

“The FBI restricted access to the malicious actor and rectified the network. The investigation remains ongoing, so we do not have further comments to provide at this time.”
...

And that utterly bizarre, and rather sparse, update from the FBI on the mysterious ‘compromising’ of some of the Epstein files brings us to the following incredible story about the history of the FBI’s extensive catalog of files and the software powering that system. Because it turns out the FBI’s post‑9/11 strategy for modernizing its troves of information was to turn to a company, Chiliad. And as the following 2013 BusinessWire piece points out, Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell, just so happens to be one of Chiliad’s co-founders:

Business Wire

New CEO to lead Company into key commercial markets.

Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of the Board to takes the reins of pioneering big data analytics company, Chiliad, Inc.

Published on 07/24/2013 at 08:00 am EDT

The Chiliad Board of Directors announced today the appointment of Ms. Christine Maxwell as the Company’s interim Chief Executive Officer. Maxwell is Chiliad´s Vice Chairman of the Board and a co-founder of the Company. She replaces Craig Norris, who is leaving to rejoin an environmental green energy start-up company that he helped co-found a few years ago.

“We are very pleased that Christine Maxwell has agreed to bring her vision and in-depth cross-disciplinary expertise to steer Chiliad’s entry into new vertical markets,” said Alan Wade, Chairman of the Board of Chiliad. “Her innovative vision and experience in commercial arenas makes her the ideal executive to lead our company through this complex landscape of emerging market opportunity and rapid industry change.”

...

Simultaneously, Chiliad continues its longtime successful cross-agency information sharing efforts in the penetration of the Government market. The company’s Discovery/Alert big data search tool — operationally proven by the US law enforcement community — reaches across information stored in incompatible databases, documents and applications held in separate departments and organizations to provide the proactive, real-time situational awareness necessary for protection and preparedness.

...

Ms. Maxwell is a 35-year veteran of the scientific and educational publishing industries; she has been a leading pioneer in the online information retrieval industry since the early 1990s. Ms. Maxwell created “Magellan”, one of the first Internet professionally curated directories that was featured on the Home page of Netscape in the early 90’s and was acquired by EXCITE in 1996.

Witeck Communications
Bob Witeck
bob@witeck.com

———–

“New CEO to lead Company into key commercial markets.” by Bob Witeck; Business Wire; 07/24/2013

“The Chiliad Board of Directors announced today the appointment of Ms. Christine Maxwell as the Company’s interim Chief Executive Officer. Maxwell is Chiliad´s Vice Chairman of the Board and a co-founder of the Company. She replaces Craig Norris, who is leaving to rejoin an environmental green energy start-up company that he helped co-found a few years ago.”

But Christine Maxwell isn’t the only very notable figure who has been involved with running Chiliad. As we saw, Alan Wade — who is listed as a Chiliad co-founder — was serving as the Chairman of the Board in 2013. And as the following 2013 article notes, Wade served as the CIA’s CIO from 2001–2005:

Washington Exec

Software AG Government Solutions Appoints Three Members to Board of Directors

By Michelle Davis
June 11, 2013

Software AG Government Solutions this morning appointed three members to its Board of Directors.

The additions to the Reston, Va. based unit of Software AG USA, Inc. who will serve the Board to provide strategic guidance to the company included Lieutenant General USAF (retired) Chuck Heflebower, Alan Wade, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief information officer (CIO) and the Honorable Dr. John Hillen.

...

Wade led a 35-year career in the CIA before retiring from federal service in 2005. Since his work with the CIA, where he served as CIO from 2001 until 2005, Wade has worked on the boards of Safeboot N.V. and Detica DFI as well as Composite Software in California, LexisNexis Special Services and Chiliad Inc. in Washington, D.C. Wade holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va. and a master’s electrical engineering degree from George Washington University.

...

————

“Software AG Government Solutions Appoints Three Members to Board of Directors” By Michelle Davis; Washington Exec; 06/11/2013

“Wade led a 35-year career in the CIA before retiring from federal service in 2005. Since his work with the CIA, where he served as CIO from 2001 until 2005, Wade has worked on the boards of Safeboot N.V. and Detica DFI as well as Composite Software in California, LexisNexis Special Services and Chiliad Inc. in Washington, D.C. Wade holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va. and a master’s electrical engineering degree from George Washington University.”

So Chiliad had Christine Maxwell as a co-founder and, back in 2013, had a former CIA CIO as the chairman of the board who was also a co-founder. But Chiliad’s ties to the US national security are much deeper than simply employing the CIA’s former CIO. As we can see, Chiliad seems to offer PROMIS-like services, where the vast structured and unstructured data scattered across the FBI’s many departments in siloed databases, is all unified into a single virtual network. In other words, if anyone knows where particular files are stored on the FBI’s servers, it’s Chiliad:

Business Wire

Chiliad, the Company That Solved the 9/11 ‘Connecting the Dots’ Problem, Hires Dan Ferranti as CEO

Industry veteran CEO Dan Ferranti assumes command to expand Chiliad’s presence

March 03, 2008 08:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–For nearly 10 years Chiliad™, Inc., has been quietly working behind the scenes to develop some of the most powerful and innovative software in the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism arsenal. With the addition of Dan Ferranti, a veteran CEO with a proven 27-year track record in the information technology field, the Washington, D.C.-based company is preparing to extend the benefits of its ground-breaking technology beyond its already-impressive client base.

Chiliad’s founders were influenced by the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Investigations into both events concluded that information stored in incompatible databases and documents maintained by different departments and organizations could have allowed managers and officials to prevent those disasters. But there simply was no existing technology to “connect the dots” across so many incompatible systems and organizations. Efforts to solve this problem hastened development efforts within Chiliad and drove the first deployment of Chiliad’s software within the U.S. intelligence community to create a virtual knowledge environment across distributed information stovepipes, databases and applications.

“The phrase ‘connecting the dots’ is central to understanding Chiliad’s principal software product, Chiliad Discovery/Alert™,” says Ferranti. Ferranti adds, ”Chiliad Discovery/Alert is a comprehensive platform that provides search, information extraction, on-the-fly analysis, real-time knowledge fusion, dynamic navigation and real time alerting. Our key differentiator is the ability to seamlessly tie together all of an organization’s distributed ‘stovepipe’ applications and disconnected data repositories. In some of our U.S. government deployments, we even go across different agencies to get at the heart of the ‘9/11 problem.’ Our software makes all of these resources appear as a single virtual repository to any authorized user.”

“We go much deeper than simply linking the user to multiple systems in a federated search environment,” Ferranti continues. “Chiliad’s software has the capacity and intelligence to analyze and compare data from a variety of networked repositories simultaneously. This means we can deliver the best information available to the user, and also uncover hidden connections in the data that would otherwise be missed.”

...

Both the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the lead U.S. agencies in the war on terrorism – have seen the unique value Chiliad offers and have deployed the company’s software to tame the mountains of data that must be sifted and analyzed to accomplish their mission.

After an extensive evaluation of available technologies, the FBI turned to Chiliad to create its Investigative Data Warehouse. Not only did Chiliad succeed where other vendors had failed, but the FBI engagement has proven to be one of the shining successes in the war on terror. Chiliad’s software helped the FBI earn the only “A” score on the “national counter-terrorism report card,” issued by the bi-partisan members of the 9/11 Commission for efforts in tracking money laundering. The FBI reported that Chiliad’s software reduced the time to process important counter-terrorism tasks from 32,000 hours to 30 minutes, saving the cost and time of 170,000 analyst hours over a four-month period, and representing a return-on-investment in productivity savings of 300 percent over the first four months of use.

Describing one of the company’s largest installations, Ferranti says, “Today, Chiliad software powers the first-of-its kind, peer-to-peer comprehensive search, analysis, and alerting capability within the largest multi-agency distributed analysis and alerting counter-terrorism system serving the nation’s lead agency for domestic counter-terrorism.”

The customer Ferranti refers to is the FBI, with 8,000 active user accounts representing intelligence analysts and agents from FBI and multi-agency joint counter-terrorism task forces. These users execute one million searches and analyses each month to connect the dots across more than 700 million records and documents from more than 50 multi-agency, multi-format data sources, connected to the National Counterterrorism Center and to databases of the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon, with an average execution time of four to six seconds.

“The performance achieved in this deployment represents just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in the scalability potential of this system, and we now are rolling out a larger deployment that will dwarf this system,” Ferranti adds.

On the strength of its success at the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence selected and funded Chiliad to create the first operational pilot to achieve and demonstrate effective, secure decentralized information sharing across U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies – a direct and successful response to one of the 9/11 Commission’s most pointed recommendations.

...

Ferranti sees Chiliad’s success in the intelligence and law enforcement field as only the beginning. In his years in the enterprise software field, Ferranti has seen many of the same problems Chiliad has solved for the intelligence and law enforcement fields manifest themselves throughout civilian government and large corporations.

“Major corporations in almost all industries, including pharmaceutical/life sciences, financial/banking, retail, marketing, energy, aerospace, healthcare, supply chain and many other fields face problems similar to the ones we have solved for the government,” Ferranti recently told his management team. “Business organizations throughout the globe are unable to effectively ‘connect the dots’ across decentralized and incompatible data collections – both internal and external to their enterprises – leaving much of the actionable business intelligence undiscovered and unused. This loss impacts both the top line and bottom line of our largest corporations every day. We can now empower them with what one government executive calls the ‘holy grail’ of actionable intelligence.”

...

————

“Chiliad, the Company That Solved the 9/11 ‘Connecting the Dots’ Problem, Hires Dan Ferranti as CEO”; Business Wire; 03/03/2008

“Chiliad’s founders were influenced by the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Investigations into both events concluded that information stored in incompatible databases and documents maintained by different departments and organizations could have allowed managers and officials to prevent those disasters. But there simply was no existing technology to “connect the dots” across so many incompatible systems and organizations. Efforts to solve this problem hastened development efforts within Chiliad and drove the first deployment of Chiliad’s software within the U.S. intelligence community to create a virtual knowledge environment across distributed information stovepipes, databases and applications.”

A post‑9/11 quest to “connect the dots” across disparate agencies and databases. That was the niche Chiliad was already filling back in 2008. And as we can see, the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence were the company’s prime customer. But Chiliad’s reach inside the US government went much further, extending across more than 50 sources connected to the National Counterterrorism Center and to databases of the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon. And this was just in 2008:

...
After an extensive evaluation of available technologies, the FBI turned to Chiliad to create its Investigative Data Warehouse. Not only did Chiliad succeed where other vendors had failed, but the FBI engagement has proven to be one of the shining successes in the war on terror. Chiliad’s software helped the FBI earn the only “A” score on the “national counter-terrorism report card,” issued by the bi-partisan members of the 9/11 Commission for efforts in tracking money laundering. The FBI reported that Chiliad’s software reduced the time to process important counter-terrorism tasks from 32,000 hours to 30 minutes, saving the cost and time of 170,000 analyst hours over a four-month period, and representing a return-on-investment in productivity savings of 300 percent over the first four months of use.

...

The customer Ferranti refers to is the FBI, with 8,000 active user accounts representing intelligence analysts and agents from FBI and multi-agency joint counter-terrorism task forces. These users execute one million searches and analyses each month to connect the dots across more than 700 million records and documents from more than 50 multi-agency, multi-format data sources, connected to the National Counterterrorism Center and to databases of the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon, with an average execution time of four to six seconds.

...

On the strength of its success at the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence selected and funded Chiliad to create the first operational pilot to achieve and demonstrate effective, secure decentralized information sharing across U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies – a direct and successful response to one of the 9/11 Commission’s most pointed recommendations.
...

And as the following 2009 piece describes, the data that is accessible by Chiliad’s software isn’t limited to databases. It’s accessing “structured” data, like databases, and “unstructured” data too, which includes texts files, images, and pretty much any other form of digital content that isn’t in a database:

eWeek

Data Search Technology Used by FBI Makes Its Way to Enterprises

Written By Brian Prince
Apr 29, 2009

For the past several years, every time someone at the FBI wanted to search for a name in its Investigative Data Warehouse, they could count on technology from Chiliad working in the background.

Think of it as an uber Google – a search engine capable of pulling information from all of your organization’s databases.

“The proof is in the pudding,” said Paul McOwen, chief operating officer of Chiliad. “A lot of people can talk about a lot of systems; this one has been in full scale operation for six years [and is] the largest counterterrorism system of its kind at the FBI. When they run 50,000 queries a day, almost all of those queries are going against all billion documents in about 200 different search engine servers, and their average response time is less than three seconds.”

Officials at Chiliad refer to this process as “connecting the dots,” a task sure to challenge organizations as the amount of data in the world continues to expand. Now, after years of focusing on the government sector, Chiliad wants to take their technology into the enterprise space.

“The ‘connecting the dots’ problem is a universal problem in all enterprises whether government or industry-focused,” said Dan Ferranti, CEO of the company. “The bottom line is that every organization can benefit substantially from being better able to find, fuse, analyze, share and act on information from across the enterprise or across the globe – as if it were all seamlessly contained in a single local real-time application.”

The dot metaphor can be taken quite literally. The company’s platform, dubbed Chiliad Discovery/Alert, works in parallel across distributed repositories of both unstructured and structured data. Rather than moving data across the network to a central indexing system, Chiliad’s technology allows organizations to put a Discovery/Alert node wherever information is managed. Each node is part of a secure peer-to-peer network that allows a query to be executed in parallel across all locations.

“What Chiliad has done is to create a massively parallel processing virtual computer, so when we run a query, the query’s actually delivered to different locations…around the world over multiple networks and that query is fired on the data sets that are behind the repositories in each of the applications,” McOwen said.

The setup allows organizations to avoid problems tied to efficiency and security associated with traditional enterprise search, Chiliad officials said.

...

The FBI began using Chiliad’s technology to get around problems involving correlating and accessing data from disparate sources, which is at the heart of what the company does. Enterprises face similar issues as they deal with volumes of unstructured and structured data, and Chiliad has spent the past few months targeting the Fortune 500 with its message.

“We’ve found that the ‘connecting the dots’ problem manifests itself in slightly different ways in specific industries and companies,” Ferranti said. “For example, Chiliad is helping a top pharmaceutical company with investigating and preventing drug counterfeiting. We are also working with multiple insurance companies in order to optimize their claims management process.”

Selling to the enterprise space, however, will mean challenging incumbent vendors adding search into larger platform packages, noted IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds.

“Microsoft, IBM and Oracle have all upgraded their search offering in the past two years, and SAP is also hoping to use this strategy,” he said. “Microsoft in particular, after its acquisition of FAST, has a highly capable enterprise search platform. Since Chiliad’s product is a platform, rather than an application, they will often need to win both a technical evaluation and a vendor viability scan against the larger players in order to be considered.”

...

Still, he referred to Chiliad’s technology as a step towards a larger trend IDC calls “Unified Access.”

“We are going to see a ‑virtualization’ trend in information access that will change the playing field away from traditional enterprise application-based models and toward much more flexible ‘search-like’ intelligence that spans structured and unstructured data and is much more sensitive to a user’s context,” said Reynolds. “Chiliad’s federation architecture is a step in this direction.”

————

“Data Search Technology Used by FBI Makes Its Way to Enterprises” By Brian Prince; eWeek; 04/29/2009

““The proof is in the pudding,” said Paul McOwen, chief operating officer of Chiliad. “A lot of people can talk about a lot of systems; this one has been in full scale operation for six years [and is] the largest counterterrorism system of its kind at the FBI. When they run 50,000 queries a day, almost all of those queries are going against all billion documents in about 200 different search engine servers, and their average response time is less than three seconds.””

A billion documents scattered across roughly 200 different search engine servers. That was was how Chiliad was touting its technology, with separate search engines scattered across various government agencies and able to access both structured and unstructured data. Keep in mind that “unstructured data” is a term often used to describe things like text files and images. And with Chiliad’s software being seen as a step towards “Unified Access”, it become clearer that Chiliad wasn’t just accessing various government databases. It was accessing all sorts of text files and images and pretty much any other digital content that resides on these government servers:

...
The dot metaphor can be taken quite literally. The company’s platform, dubbed Chiliad Discovery/Alert, works in parallel across distributed repositories of both unstructured and structured data. Rather than moving data across the network to a central indexing system, Chiliad’s technology allows organizations to put a Discovery/Alert node wherever information is managed. Each node is part of a secure peer-to-peer network that allows a query to be executed in parallel across all locations.

...

The FBI began using Chiliad’s technology to get around problems involving correlating and accessing data from disparate sources, which is at the heart of what the company does. Enterprises face similar issues as they deal with volumes of unstructured and structured data, and Chiliad has spent the past few months targeting the Fortune 500 with its message.

...

Still, he referred to Chiliad’s technology as a step towards a larger trend IDC calls “Unified Access.”

“We are going to see a ‑virtualization’ trend in information access that will change the playing field away from traditional enterprise application-based models and toward much more flexible ‘search-like’ intelligence that spans structured and unstructured data and is much more sensitive to a user’s context,” said Reynolds. “Chiliad’s federation architecture is a step in this direction.”
...

This was 2009. Has that “Unified Access” been achieved yet? What’s Chiliad’s relationship to the federal government today? For a company this deeply embedded in the national security infrastructure there sure isn’t very much reporting on them. Mostly just BusinessWire PR pieces put out by the company itself. We’ll just have to wonder. Much like how we’ll just have to wonder about what actually happened with virtually every other angle to this story as it all gets worse, dumber, and more corrupt.

But there’s another grimly fascinating reason the New Mexico ranch is coming under renewed scrutiny: it turns out the new owner has a rather interesting political pedigree. That would be Don Huffines, a Dallas real estate magnate and former state senator who just won the GOP primary for the Texas comptroller race. As we’ve seen, Huffines isn’t just some random Texas Republican. He’s close to Tim Dunn, the billionaire far right theocrat who is effectively the Texas Republican kingmaker at this point. And as we’ve also seen, not only does Dunn’s network of political entities have a history of working with extremist figures like Nick Fuentes, but Huffines was found to have two of those extremists — Jake Lloyd Colglazier and Konner Earnest — on his 2022 campaign staff. Colglazier and Earnest both worked for Dunn’s political action group Defend Texas Liberty, which has donated millions of dollars to Huffines’s campaigns. Dunn also happens to be a major player in financing the MAGA-universe of political entities, including being one of the earliest financiers behind the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the entity that was working on the official MAGA-backed alternative to Project 2025. Notably, President Trump endorsed Huffines in the comptroller race. In other words, the Texas Republican candidate who is now facing major scrutiny over his purchase of the Epstein ranch has very powerful political allies, one of whom is President Trump.

As we’ll see, Huffines 2023 purchase of the ranch is raising a number of eyebrows today. In part because the Huffines claim they didn’t look at the property at all before purchasing it. But also because the purchase was done using an LLC that kept the owners’ names and purchase amount sealed from the public. In fact, it was only after the LLC changed the name of a road and challenged the property taxes that a public records request revealed Huffines’s identity.

Huffines now claims he’s planning on turning the ranch into a Christian camp. Which brings us to the warning from Andrea Romero, the New Mexico state representative now leading the truth commission, about the serious risk that evidence of Epstein’s crimes on the property are being destroyed with each new construction project. A risk that is amplified by the stunning fact that the property was never actually investigated. Keep in mind that Epstein purchased the property in 1993, so his crime spree there spans roughly 27 years. With no investigation.

Also keep in mind that the 1993 purchase happened during this same early era of Epstein’s rise as a socialite that was heavily sponsored by billionaire Les Wexner, the man who appears to have long played the role as the behind-the-scenes organizing force behind Epstein’s influence peddling. Recall how Wexner financed the purchase of two adjacent prime Manhattan pieces of real estate — 9 and 11 E. 71st Street — in the late 80s and then effectively handed ownership of the properties to Epstein in 1992. It’s hard to imagine that the 1993 purchase of ranch wasn’t a similar Wexner-backed scheme.

Note that it does turn out there was a brief point of interests by the FBI in the property back in February of 2007, stemming from the investigation in Florida, which result in an interview at the property of the ranch’s manager. The interview was abruptly ended, however, when someone called the staff and instructed them that “they were no longer allowed to speak with us,” according to the FBI agent. And that apparently ended the FBI’s interest in the property.

But it’s not just a lack of interest by federal authorities in the property. It turns out federal officials squashed a local investigation after New Mexican authorities launched an investigation into the property in 2019 following Epstein’s arrest, shortly before his death. State officials recount how they were asked by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York in September of 2019 to turn over all of the evidence they had collected and stop the state’s investigation. It sounds like the federal investigation just kind of fizzled out from there and nothing ever happened, with the net effect that the property was never searched by state or federal officials. Alarmed over the lack of action, Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general back in 2019, had his office write a letter to federal investigators urging them to seize Epstein’s New Mexico assets. He never got a response.

Other examples of the gross negligence of the investigators includes an account from Eddy Aragon, an Albuquerque radio DJ who recounts how he got a tip about bodies buried at the ranch that he passed along to local investigators. An anonymous tip came from someone claiming to have worked at the ranch and that the deaths of two abused girls was concealed by burying their bodies in the hills outside the ranch. Aragon never heard back and it remains unclear if the FBI ever investigated the allegations. Since having his identity revealed as the new owner of the property, Huffines has told reporters that law enforcement had not contacted him about getting access to the premises.

Another very intriguing detail about this property is the fact that it included a private runway and helicopter pad. In addition, we are told that residents in the area recounted frequent air traffic. Keep in mind that a private runway is potentially quite valuable when considering Epstein’s utility as an intelligence assets. After all, if Epstein was capable of trafficking abused girls around the globe, he was probably adept at moving all sorts of people and objects. It also adds a new wrinkle to the revelation that Epstein was investigated by the DEA for drug-trafficking-related activities from 2010 to 2015. Drug trafficking is a lot easier when you own a private runway.

But then there’s the array of allegations from Epstein’s victims about their time at the ranch, including a girl from the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan who recount how she traveled to New York City and New Mexico with Epstein and Maxwell. Her abuse started at the age of 14. Recall how “>Epstein’s predation of Interlochen students started in the early 1990s and included Epstein (but really Wexner) financing the construction of a lodge on the Interlochen campus where Epstein and Maxwell would stay during their trips to the campus. Virginia Giuffre had a particularly stunning allegation about the abuse she experienced at the ranch, claiming that former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson was one of the powerful men who abused her at the property. That’s all part of Rep. Romero of the truth commission was referring to when she reveal, after meeting with the victims, how “they said among the things that were happening with Jeffrey Epstein and his whole operation in various states, that New Mexico was basically the worst.”

Another notable detail in the long-delayed New Mexico investigations is the fact that Deutsche Bank announced a $4.95 million pledge in late 2023 to “fund additional resources to prevent, investigate, and prosecute human trafficking in the state of New Mexico.” The pledge reported stemmed from an investigation by New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez into “various financial services companies and the role they played in failing to identify the sexual abuse and trafficking of underage girls” at the ranch. It’s unclear what exactly was being done with that $4.95 million pledge or if it’s somehow playing a role in funding the recently started truth commission.

That’s all part of the context of the growing alarm over the fact that the Texas GOP’s nominee for comptroller is the no-longer-secret-owner of the infamous Epstein ranch. It’s not just that he secretly bought this ranch. It’s the complete lack of investigations and the fact that evidence is likely being destroyed as Huffines turns the property into some sort of Christian camp. And while the revelations about Huffines’s ownership of the property didn’t stop him from winning the Republican primary for the comptroller race, it hasn’t exactly gone over well. As we’ll see, there’s no shortage of Texas Republican officials who are now decrying Huffines’s decision to purchase the property. But that doesn’t change the fact that Huffines won the primary and could easily go on to become Texas’s next comptroller:

MSNOW

Trump-backed candidate wins GOP primary for Texas comptroller

Don Huffines beat out the acting comptroller despite criticism of his family’s purchase of the New Mexico ranch that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein.

By Ja’han Jones
Mar. 4, 2026, 1:45 PM EST

Don Huffines, the far-right, Trump-endorsed candidate for Texas comptroller who says he wants to “DOGE Texas government,” won on Tuesday despite criticism of his ownership of deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s former ranch in New Mexico.

...

Last month, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that Huffines’ family was now the owner of a ranch that Epstein had fashioned into a hub for his eugenics-style plan to “seed” the human race with his DNA. The purchase of the property at public auction took place in 2023, four years after Epstein died by suicide while he was being held for trial. A spokesperson for the family told The Texas Tribune that they never looked at the property before buying it.

The ranch, which Epstein called Zorro Ranch, is the subject of fresh investigations by New Mexico lawmakers and the state’s Department of Justice over an unverified allegation that surfaced in the most recent release of the Epstein files — that Epstein had two girls buried near the property. There’s no evidence to suggest Huffines has any other connection to Epstein.

Amid questions about his ownership of the ranch, some of which came from fellow conservatives, Huffines told scandal-plagued former congressman Matt Gaetz — another one of his endorsers — last month that his family has been planning to convert the ranch into a camp for Christians. Not all conservatives were convinced. Among the local Republican officials criticizing the purchase was a precinct chair who told The Center Square, “It’s a glaring indictment that Huffines would purchase property where girls were raped and tortured.”

...

————

“Trump-backed candidate wins GOP primary for Texas comptroller” By Ja’han Jones; MSNOW; 03/04/2026

“Last month, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that Huffines’ family was now the owner of a ranch that Epstein had fashioned into a hub for his eugenics-style plan to “seed” the human race with his DNA. The purchase of the property at public auction took place in 2023, four years after Epstein died by suicide while he was being held for trial. A spokesperson for the family told The Texas Tribune that they never looked at the property before buying it.”

They never even looked at the property before purchasing it! Yes, that’s the explanation we’re getting from the Huffines family about the remarkable decision to purchase Jeffrey Epstein’s vast New Mexico estate. They just kind of bought it without even looking. It’s the kind of absurdist ‘explanation’ that suggests a very wildly sordid real explanation. And when we see how allegations of buried bodies on the property are now hopefully being looked into finally, it’s not hard to see why Huffines would be very eager to insist he knows nothing about anything that may have happened at the property:

...
The ranch, which Epstein called Zorro Ranch, is the subject of fresh investigations by New Mexico lawmakers and the state’s Department of Justice over an unverified allegation that surfaced in the most recent release of the Epstein files — that Epstein had two girls buried near the property. There’s no evidence to suggest Huffines has any other connection to Epstein.
...

It’s also the kind of explanation that doesn’t explain why it was that the 2023 purchase of the ranch was done with an LLC that kept the owners names and purchase amount sealed from the public. Which is presumably part of the reason one New Mexico Republican official after another is quick to condemn the purchase as as morally contemptible decision that couldn’t be defended:

The Center Square

Texas Republicans alarmed about comptroller candidate’s purchase of Epstein ranch

By Bethany Blankley | The Center Square contributor Feb 15, 2026

(The Center Square) – Texas Republicans are expressing alarm about a GOP state comptroller candidate, Don Huffines, for secretly purchasing a New Mexico ranch owned by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. They and many others are calling for transparency and an investigation.

Huffines’ LLC purchased the ranch in 2023 with the owners’ names and purchase amount kept sealed. It wasn’t until after the LLC changed the name of a road and challenged property taxes in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, that through a public records request the ownership and property value were made public. Huffines’ wife is listed as a trustee and his son as LLC manager, The Center Square reported. Huffines’ campaign consultant said the proceeds of the purchase went to victims; Epstein’s estate attorney in 2023 said proceeds went to cover administrative costs and creditors.

...

Among the more than three million Epstein Files released, more than 4,200 mention the Zorro Ranch purchased by Huffines. FBI witness statements include a Native American who says Epstein paid her mother to bring her and other children to the ranch for many years, where they say they were forced into sexual violence with high-profile men.

A woman from Cape Town, South Africa, told Sky News Epstein repeatedly raped her, including at the ranch. The New Mexico land commissioner first called for an investigation in 2019. Investigations are being launched to find possible remains buried on neighboring state land.

“It shows incredibly bad judgment to be associated with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in any form or fashion,” Wayne Hamilton, former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas, told The Center Square. “If you are buying a piece of land, the first thing that should have been done is total transparency. If the property is suspected of criminal activity, why not be transparent with state officials in New Mexico? Huffines wants to run the finances of Texas, yet he won’t be transparent with his own dealings with former Epstein assets.”

Tarrant County precinct chair Sheena Rodriguez, who’s been advocating for trafficked children for years, told The Center Square, “It’s a glaring indictment that Huffines would purchase property where girls were raped and tortured. If you were willing to do that for a good investment what else are you willing to do? We are dealing with people who live in an elitist world who don’t have to worry about the price of groceries going up. They have no moral qualms about investing in property where atrocities occurred.

...

A lifelong conservative Republican and leader in Marion County, Hunter Bonner told The Center Square, “I am at a loss as to why any person, who considers themselves a Christian, would want to spend one dime on anything that was previously owned by Jeffrey Epstein, other than to turn it over to law enforcement for a complete forensic investigation.That property was owned by a disgusting creature involved in the sex trafficking and abuse of children.”

Judy Adams, a Denton County Republican Party precinct chair, told The Center Square that when Huffines was a state senator, he helped “flip his district blue.” Secretively purchasing the Epstein ranch “is deeply troubling. Buying the property anonymously through a newly created LLC … raises serious ethical questions about his intentions and transparency” and “about his dedication to the constituents he claims to serve, and none of this aligns with true conservative principles.”

Mary Ann Jackson, a Harris County Republican Party precinct chair, said the revelations are “disgusting and disheartening” after she’s been “working hard to help the Texas Republican Party. Christian conservatives are tired of all the corruption and deceit. How could a candidate running for Texas Comptroller send out flyers about how he is going to ‘expose government corruption’ cover up his own personal [purchase of Epstein property]? Why not stay away from any connection to Epstein who is the epitome of a reprobate mind? If you couldn’t pass on such a financial deal, why wouldn’t you invite law enforcement to investigate the sex trafficking allegations around that ranch?”

Lynn Davenport, a former Dallas County GOP precinct chair and delegate to the Republican Party state convention,has criticized Huffines, her former state senator, for investing in a biotech company that uses cells from baby hearts under 30 days old while claiming to be pro-life. She’s taking issue with Huffines “refusing to speak about his intentions for the property in the wake of questions surrounding potential burials of victims allegedly on the property under Epstein’s ownership.If he purchased the property for altruistic reasons to donate to the victims, why all the secrecy? He is running for Texas comptroller on a platform of transparency. I’m not buying it.”

...

————

“Texas Republicans alarmed about comptroller candidate’s purchase of Epstein ranch” By Bethany Blankley; The Center Square; 02/15/2026

” Huffines’ LLC purchased the ranch in 2023 with the owners’ names and purchase amount kept sealed. It wasn’t until after the LLC changed the name of a road and challenged property taxes in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, that through a public records request the ownership and property value were made public. Huffines’ wife is listed as a trustee and his son as LLC manager, The Center Square reported. Huffines’ campaign consultant said the proceeds of the purchase went to victims; Epstein’s estate attorney in 2023 said proceeds went to cover administrative costs and creditors.”

A secret purchase that was only publicly revealed after the LLC challenged property taxes, triggering a public records request that revealed the Huffines’s ownership. Oops. It’s not hard to see why Huffines may have wanted to keep his purchase a secret. Especially now that we can see how the Zorro Ranch is mentioned 4,200 times in the released Epstein files. Including witness statements from a range of abuse victims who were trafficked to the ranch to high-profile men. The available evidence points to this ranch being a major location of Epstein’s crimes over multiple decades. And the Huffines’ tried to secretly buy it, while now claiming they didn’t even inspect the property before making the purchase:

...
Among the more than three million Epstein Files released, more than 4,200 mention the Zorro Ranch purchased by Huffines. FBI witness statements include a Native American who says Epstein paid her mother to bring her and other children to the ranch for many years, where they say they were forced into sexual violence with high-profile men.

A woman from Cape Town, South Africa, told Sky News Epstein repeatedly raped her, including at the ranch. The New Mexico land commissioner first called for an investigation in 2019. Investigations are being launched to find possible remains buried on neighboring state land.
...

And as the following NY Times piece warns, while the New Mexican legislature voted unanimously to create a “truth commission” to investigate the ranch last month, even if the Zorro Ranch does finally undergo a wildly overdue investigation, it may be too late thanks to all the modifications made by the Huffines that will have inevitably destroyed evidence:

The New York Times

Epstein’s New Mexico Ranch Gets Scrutiny at Last. It May Be Too Late.

By Reis Thebault
Reporting from the New Mexico high desert south of Santa Fe
March 1, 2026

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s most secretive and least scrutinized former properties is not an island. But it might as well be.

His palatial 30,000-square-foot New Mexico mansion sits on a ridge overlooking thousands of acres of southwestern land he named Zorro Ranch. A sea of tufted grass, prickly cholla cactus and cracked arroyos, the sparsely populated high desert south of Santa Fe is a land where the nearest neighbors are miles away and most everyone minds their own business.

Some of the financier’s victims have said they were trafficked there, famous figures visited, and Mr. Epstein mused about turning Zorro into a headquarters for outlandish genetic engineering experiments.

And yet, New Mexico leaders say there has never been a thorough investigation of the criminal activity that may have occurred at the ranch during the 26 years the convicted sex offender owned it. A state-led inquiry into Mr. Epstein’s actions was taken over by federal prosecutors in 2019, and then apparently fizzled, according to New Mexico officials and recently unsealed records.

“Not only has it been overshadowed, it’s been completely ignored,” said Eddy Aragon, an Albuquerque radio D.J. who has spent years researching Mr. Epstein’s activities.

He checked off the other corners of Mr. Epstein’s empire that have been scoured, such as Little St. James, the notorious private island hide-out in the Caribbean. “Everyone was paying attention to Paris, Little St. James, New York and Miami, but they didn’t pay attention to Zorro Ranch.”

Last month, lawmakers in New Mexico, spurred by the Justice Department’s latest release of Epstein documents, voted unanimously to change that, impaneling a bipartisan four-member “truth commission” in the State Legislature, equipped with subpoena power, to probe the sordid history of Zorro Ranch. The state’s attorney general also announced he would reopen an investigation his office had closed shortly before Mr. Epstein’s death in 2019.

“We need to find out how he was able to operate without any accountability,” said Andrea Romero, a New Mexico state representative from Santa Fe who is leading the truth commission. “We have to understand what allowed this to happen.”

That won’t be easy. Since Mr. Epstein’s death, the property has changed hands, potentially complicating the state’s investigation. The new owner, a Dallas real estate magnate and former state senator named Don Huffines, is running for comptroller of Texas, an inopportune moment for investigators, though he has said he would cooperate with law enforcement.

But the unverified claims in the documents have proved impossible to ignore. An anonymous tip from someone who claimed to have worked at the ranch said Mr. Epstein concealed the deaths of two abused girls by ordering them to be buried in the hills outside the ranch. It is unclear whether the F.B.I. ever looked into the tip.

The files also included correspondence between Mr. Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors indicating that investigators had not searched the ranch as of December 2019.

...

The year of Mr. Epstein’s death, 2019, was also the year the trail went cold in the high desert. As the criminal case against Mr. Epstein gained momentum, the New Mexico attorney general’s office was interviewing witnesses about his possible wrongdoing locally.

But federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked the state authorities to stop their work and share all they had found with federal officials, according to Hector Balderas, a former New Mexico attorney general, and recently released emails. The prosecutors believed their case would be stronger if they led the investigation, Mr. Balderas recalled.

But a year later, he decided federal authorities were not being aggressive enough, and his office sent a letter urging them to seize Mr. Epstein’s New Mexico assets.

...

Mr. Balderas did not receive a reply. The Southern District of New York directed a request for comment to the Justice Department, which did not respond.

...

The tip about buried bodies was originally sent in 2019 to Mr. Aragon, who said he alerted local authorities. He never heard back.

...

Mr. Epstein purchased the ranch near the town of Stanley in 1993 from the family of a three-time New Mexico governor, Bruce King, linking himself with the state’s political elite as he did elsewhere. With small living quarters and little else to work with, Mr. Epstein started major construction projects.

Jim Sloan, an artist and longtime resident of the area, turned down work on Zorro Ranch in the 1990s rather than sign a nondisclosure agreement.

...

The sprawling compound would eventually include a private runway, a helicopter pad, an airplane hangar for his personal jet and a mansion believed to be the largest in the state. Barbed-wire fencing lined the outskirts, and hidden cameras recorded comings and goings.

Residents of the rural towns nearby saw the mansion’s glaring lights at night and the frequent air traffic, but most did not know who lived there or what was going on inside.

...

Today, New Mexico officials say Mr. Epstein appeared drawn to their state for several reasons.

Along with the King family, Mr. Epstein’s powerful connections included Bill Richardson, another former governor of New Mexico, United Nations ambassador and energy secretary, who died in 2023. New Mexico also has more lenient sex offender registry laws, which allowed Mr. Epstein to avoid registration after pleading guilty to felony sex crimes in Florida.

Then, there was geography. In addition to Zorro Ranch, Mr. Epstein leased about 1,200 acres of public land adjacent to it, ostensibly for grazing. Instead, he used it to further buffer illicit activity, said Stephanie Garcia Richard, New Mexico’s public lands commissioner, who canceled the contracts in 2019.

...

Ms. Romero, the state representative, is concerned that potential evidence may have been lost since Mr. Epstein’s death and the property’s sale in 2023.

Mr. Huffines, the new owner, said recently that he was planning to turn the property into a Christian retreat. Law enforcement had not contacted him about getting access to the premises, he said, but he would comply if they did.

Mr. Huffines has renamed the place San Rafael Ranch, after the patron saint of healing. He is building a new front gate, and when it is complete, he said, the stone arch above the entrance will read: “Blessed are those who come in the name of the Lord.”

———-

“Epstein’s New Mexico Ranch Gets Scrutiny at Last. It May Be Too Late.” By Reis Thebault; The New York Times; 03/01/2026

“And yet, New Mexico leaders say there has never been a thorough investigation of the criminal activity that may have occurred at the ranch during the 26 years the convicted sex offender owned it. A state-led inquiry into Mr. Epstein’s actions was taken over by federal prosecutors in 2019, and then apparently fizzled, according to New Mexico officials and recently unsealed records.”

A state-led inquiry into Epstein was taken over by federal prosecutors in 2019, and then apparently fizzled. Imagine that. It would be interesting to know when exactly the investigation fizzled. Was it immediate or did it take a few years? We’re told by Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general back in 2019, that he was asked to stop his work and share everything with the federal prosecutors back in 2019. This was apparently as the criminal investigation into Epstein was still ongoing. But then, a year later, Balderas concluded that the federal authorities weren’t being aggressive enough and sent them a letter urging them to see Epstein’s New Mexico assets. He never got a reply. This is a good time to recall how federal prosecutors initially got involved with Epstein’s original prosecution that led up to the federal sweetheart deal when Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter and the lead detective, Joe Recarey, protested the decision by Palm Beach prosecutors to not charge Epstein, under the premise that the girls were prostitutes. Reiter and Recarey took the case to the US Attorney’s Office. Epstein was on the cusp of getting a sweetheart local deal in Palm Beach before the feds got involved and ultimately gave him the federal sweetheart deal. It wasn’t until 2019 that Epstein appeared to face any sort of real investigation by states like New Mexico, and yet, even after his death, federal prosecutors seemed intent on thwarting any real investigation:

...
The files also included correspondence between Mr. Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors indicating that investigators had not searched the ranch as of December 2019.

...

The year of Mr. Epstein’s death, 2019, was also the year the trail went cold in the high desert. As the criminal case against Mr. Epstein gained momentum, the New Mexico attorney general’s office was interviewing witnesses about his possible wrongdoing locally.

But federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked the state authorities to stop their work and share all they had found with federal officials, according to Hector Balderas, a former New Mexico attorney general, and recently released emails. The prosecutors believed their case would be stronger if they led the investigation, Mr. Balderas recalled.

But a year later, he decided federal authorities were not being aggressive enough, and his office sent a letter urging them to seize Mr. Epstein’s New Mexico assets.

...

Mr. Balderas did not receive a reply. The Southern District of New York directed a request for comment to the Justice Department, which did not respond.
...

And now we have a new reason for serious investigation to not happen: Huffines’s purchase of the property, which has probably resulted in the destruction of all sorts of evidence:

...
Last month, lawmakers in New Mexico, spurred by the Justice Department’s latest release of Epstein documents, voted unanimously to change that, impaneling a bipartisan four-member “truth commission” in the State Legislature, equipped with subpoena power, to probe the sordid history of Zorro Ranch. The state’s attorney general also announced he would reopen an investigation his office had closed shortly before Mr. Epstein’s death in 2019.

“We need to find out how he was able to operate without any accountability,” said Andrea Romero, a New Mexico state representative from Santa Fe who is leading the truth commission. “We have to understand what allowed this to happen.”

That won’t be easy. Since Mr. Epstein’s death, the property has changed hands, potentially complicating the state’s investigation. The new owner, a Dallas real estate magnate and former state senator named Don Huffines, is running for comptroller of Texas, an inopportune moment for investigators, though he has said he would cooperate with law enforcement.

...

Ms. Romero, the state representative, is concerned that potential evidence may have been lost since Mr. Epstein’s death and the property’s sale in 2023.

Mr. Huffines, the new owner, said recently that he was planning to turn the property into a Christian retreat. Law enforcement had not contacted him about getting access to the premises, he said, but he would comply if they did.

Mr. Huffines has renamed the place San Rafael Ranch, after the patron saint of healing. He is building a new front gate, and when it is complete, he said, the stone arch above the entrance will read: “Blessed are those who come in the name of the Lord.”
...

And while it’s great to see a “truth commission” finally getting underway, when we see these anecdotes about tips about claims of bodies being buried on the property having been ignored by local investigators back in 2019, it’s hard to be overly confident about what the new truth commission will be allowed to uncover. The Zorro Ranch is clearly a place many powerful people don’t want investigated:

...
“Not only has it been overshadowed, it’s been completely ignored,” said Eddy Aragon, an Albuquerque radio D.J. who has spent years researching Mr. Epstein’s activities.

...

But the unverified claims in the documents have proved impossible to ignore. An anonymous tip from someone who claimed to have worked at the ranch said Mr. Epstein concealed the deaths of two abused girls by ordering them to be buried in the hills outside the ranch. It is unclear whether the F.B.I. ever looked into the tip.

...

The tip about buried bodies was originally sent in 2019 to Mr. Aragon, who said he alerted local authorities. He never heard back.
...

Also note the timing of Epstein’s purchase of the ranch: 1993, timing that strongly suggests it was one of the many properties ultimately financed by Lex Wexner. Recall how Wexner financed the purchase of two adjacent prime Manhattan pieces of real estate — 9 and 11 E. 71st Street — in the late 80s and then effectively handed ownership of the properties to Epstein in 1992. Which is a reminder that the purchase of the Zorro Ranch was likely seen as another step in Wexner’s sponsorship of Jeffrey Epstein as an influential socialite:

...
Mr. Epstein purchased the ranch near the town of Stanley in 1993 from the family of a three-time New Mexico governor, Bruce King, linking himself with the state’s political elite as he did elsewhere. With small living quarters and little else to work with, Mr. Epstein started major construction projects.

Jim Sloan, an artist and longtime resident of the area, turned down work on Zorro Ranch in the 1990s rather than sign a nondisclosure agreement.

...

Today, New Mexico officials say Mr. Epstein appeared drawn to their state for several reasons.

Along with the King family, Mr. Epstein’s powerful connections included Bill Richardson, another former governor of New Mexico, United Nations ambassador and energy secretary, who died in 2023. New Mexico also has more lenient sex offender registry laws, which allowed Mr. Epstein to avoid registration after pleading guilty to felony sex crimes in Florida.
...

And when we see how the ranch had both a private runway and a helicopter pad, keep in mind that you can traffic a lot more than just young women when you have infrastructure like that. Private jets and runways are invaluable for criminal industries like the drug trade. Also keep in mind that this ability to traffic all sorts of people and products likely played a role in Epstein’s value as a presumed intelligence asset:

...
The sprawling compound would eventually include a private runway, a helicopter pad, an airplane hangar for his personal jet and a mansion believed to be the largest in the state. Barbed-wire fencing lined the outskirts, and hidden cameras recorded comings and goings.

Residents of the rural towns nearby saw the mansion’s glaring lights at night and the frequent air traffic, but most did not know who lived there or what was going on inside.

...

Then, there was geography. In addition to Zorro Ranch, Mr. Epstein leased about 1,200 acres of public land adjacent to it, ostensibly for grazing. Instead, he used it to further buffer illicit activity, said Stephanie Garcia Richard, New Mexico’s public lands commissioner, who canceled the contracts in 2019.
...

And as we can see in the following report, not only is it the case that federal have never searched the ranch, but it’s also the case that federal investigators did take an interest in the ranch back in 2007 during the initial federal investigation into Epstein. The FBI even interviewed the ranch’s property manager. But they never got a chance to complete the interview after the employees got a phone call telling them to stop talking with investigators. The FBI apparently concluded there was nothing suspicious about that. Flash forward to 2019, and we learn about a retired New Mexico state police officer who sent the FBI a tip about the abuses he had heard about taking place at the ranch. The FBI told him he had “no factual evidence to support this claim.” See no evil, hear no evil, and cover it up when that’s not an option:

The Guardian

From New York to New Mexico: new Epstein files shed light on his sprawling ranch outside Santa Fe

Several men appear in photos on the nearly 10,000-acre Zorro ranch, which included a 26,700 sq ft mansion
Anna Betts and Victoria Bekiempis
Sun 8 Feb 2026 09.22 EST

For years, Jeffrey Epstein took respite at a sprawling ranch in the desert scrub outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Epstein’s nearly 10,000-acre (4,000-hectare) property – known as Zorro ranch – was dotted with cholla cactus and Angus cattle, and came to include a 26,700 sq ft mansion, as well as a private runway and hangar.

For years, Epstein abused teenage girls and young women on this ranch with impunity, according to testimony from several women. In court proceedings, survivors detailed horror after horror they say unfolded on this isolated expanse of land.

Authorities searched many of Epstein’s other properties over the years – his New York townhouse, private Caribbean island, Palm Beach estate and Paris apartment – but state and local officials said they were not aware of any federal search of the ranch.

Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general at the time of Epstein’s 2019 arrest, said that in 2019 his office “investigated activity that occurred in New Mexico that was still viable for prosecution, including contact with multiple victims”. But, he said, the US attorneys in New York handling the federal investigation “asked that we hold any further state investigation or prosecution of activity related to Epstein, as they communicated to us that they were already leading an active multi-jurisdictional prosecution”.

Emails released by the justice department last week as part of a large set of documents related to Epstein also suggest that a search did not occur around the time of Epstein’s arrest. In September 2019, Manhattan federal prosecutors said that they spoke with the New Mexico attorney general’s office, who they said had “agreed to cease any investigation into sex trafficking and share whatever they had gathered regarding sex trafficking activity with our office”.

In a December 2019 email, a prosecutor told a lawyer for one of Epstein’s estate co-executors that they had “not searched the New Mexico property”.

...

*****

Multiple women have said that Epstein abused them as teen girls or young adults on his New Mexico ranch.

Among them is Jane, the first accuser to testify at Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial. Jane said that she met Epstein in 1994 while attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts, an esteemed youth arts camp in Michigan. When Maxwell and Epstein learned that Jane was from Palm Beach, they requested her mother’s phone number, she testified.

Jane provided them with her mom’s contact information. When Jane returned from Interlochen, she and her mother were invited to tea.

She started spending time with Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein started to sexually abuse Jane when she was 14.

Jane said that she traveled with Epstein and Maxwell to New York City and New Mexico. “I just remember someone, at one point, just came into [my] room and said: ‘Jeffrey wants to see you,’ and then escorted me to see him,” she said. “I just, as usual, felt, like, my heart sink into my stomach, you know.”

...

Annie Farmer, the fourth accuser to testify at Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, said that the British socialite gave her a nude massage at the ranch when she was 16.

During Maxwell’s trial, Farmer testified that the morning after this encounter with Maxwell, Epstein lumbered into bed with her and said he “wanted to cuddle” and she “felt kind of frozen”.

...

Another woman identified as Jane Doe said she met Epstein during a school trip to New York City. At Epstein’s townhouse, his secretary allegedly took photos of her and told her that Epstein “really wanted to meet her”. A few weeks later, Jane Doe alleged that the secretary emailed that “Epstein was excited by the photos and that he was very interested in [her] ...”

Jane Doe and her sister were invited to a magic show in Las Vegas and then Epstein’s ranch. After the magic show, they flew on Epstein’s plane to New Mexico. He was there “along with several young girls”, Jane Doe claimed.

At the ranch, Jane Doe said she was summoned to the main house and brought to Epstein’s bedroom. There, she alleged, Epstein was wearing a bathrobe and demanded a massage. She felt that Epstein wanted her to participate in sexual activity “but she did not know what it was. Epstein seemed to get frustrated as a result.” Epstein assaulted her with a device, she said in court papers.

Virginia Giuffre, one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, was among those who said they were victimized at the ranch. Giuffre, who sued Maxwell for defamation after the British socialite accused her of lying, provided photos of herself at the ranch in a 2015 court document.

Giuffre said that Epstein trafficked her to powerful men at the ranch, including the late Bill Richardson, who served as New Mexico governor from 2003 to 2011.

A spokesperson for Richardson, who died in 2023, previously said that the former governor never met Giuffre and that “these allegations and inferences are completely false” and that in his “limited interactions with Mr Epstein, he never saw him in the presence of young or underage girls”.

*****

Epstein bought the secluded New Mexico property in 1993 from the family of Bruce King, the state’s former three-time Democratic governor. Records show that Epstein acquired the property through an entity named the Zorro Trust, which later became Cypress Inc, and that the purchase included about 1,200 acres (485 hectares) of state land, leased for agricultural purposes.

Undated photos in the batch of Epstein files released last week offer rare glimpses of life on the ranch: Epstein’s giant mansion, the stables, a vintage caboose and livestock, as well as Epstein himself on the land with dogs. Other images show young women, whose faces are redacted, riding horses, practicing archery and shooting.

Several men also appear in the photos, including the late French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, linguist Noam Chomsky and film-maker Woody Allen. A representative for Allen did not respond to a request for comment about the image. Neither Chomsky nor Allen have been accused of criminal wrongdoing related to Epstein.

In a lengthy statement, Valeria Chomsky, the second wife and spokesperson for Chomsky, said that they had lunch at Epstein’s ranch once, “in connection with a professional event”.

“We attended social meetings, lunches, and dinners where Epstein was present and academic matters were discussed,” she said. “We never witnessed any inappropriate, criminal, or reproachable behavior from Epstein or others. At no time did we see children or underage individuals present.”

After Epstein pleaded guilty to state prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, including soliciting a minor in a controversial deal that let him avoid federal charges, the ranch provided a quiet retreat. That was until July 2019, when Epstein was charged with sex-trafficking crimes in New York, and state officials quickly began taking a look at his desert ranch.

Balderas, New Mexico’s then-attorney general, opened an investigation that month, and Stephanie Garcia Richard, who was newly elected as the state’s commissioner of public land, provided about 400 pages of lease documents to Balderas and began reviewing Epstein’s two state grazing leases.

That same month, the New York Times reported that Epstein had privately told scientists and business associates that he had hoped to use the ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm, and would give birth to his babies.

In September 2019, Garcia Richard cancelled Epstein’s state grazing leases, citing obstructed inspections, misrepresentation in filings and that the attorney general had concluded that the entity may have obtained “the leases through illegitimate means for purposes other than ranching or agriculture”.

...

Garcia Richard told the Guardian that the 1,200 acres have since been divided into two parcels. One, she said, has been considered for a number of uses, including a wildlife refuge area or as a “potential memorial site for girls and women who were harmed at the ranch”, while the other remains leasable.

In 2021, Epstein’s estate listed the remaining roughly 8,000 acres for sale, including the residences and structures. The Wall Street Journal reported that the proceeds were set to go to his estate “including as necessary to compensate claimants, tax authorities, and creditors”.

The property was sold in 2023 to an LLC listed as San Rafael Ranch LLC. Later that year, the New Mexico attorney general, Raúl Torrez, announced a $4.95m pledge by Deutsche Bank – which, earlier that year, had agreed to pay $75m to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of women who accused the German lender of helping facilitate Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations – to “fund additional resources to prevent, investigate, and prosecute human trafficking in the state of New Mexico”.

The funding, officials said, stemmed from an investigation Torrez conducted into “various financial services companies and the role they played in failing to identify the sexual abuse and trafficking of underage girls” at Zorro ranch.

*****

While Epstein’s activities at Zorro ranch remained hidden from public view, records recently released by the Department of Justice indicate that federal authorities briefly took an interest in the property almost 20 years ago.

In February 2007, as part of an investigation of child sexual abuse in Florida, records show that the FBI interviewed Epstein’s ranch manager at the New Mexico property.

Per the document, the ranch manager told the FBI that he and his wife had overseen the property for about four years, and that Epstein typically spent several weeks there in the summer, often accompanied by “his personal assistant, his bodyguard, friends, personal trainer, and sometimes his masseuses”.

The interview ended abruptly, according to the agent. The investigator wrote that someone called the staff and instructed them that “they were no longer allowed to speak with us”.

“The interview was immediately ended,” the report notes.

Other than that, Epstein and his ranch appeared to have drawn little law enforcement scrutiny before his death. The Santa Fe county sheriff’s office, which has jurisdiction over the ranch, had records of several incidents on or around the property; none were related to alleged sexual abuse.

Records do show that Epstein registered with the Santa Fe county sheriff’s office as a sex offender on 17 August 2010, after being notified by the New Mexico department of public safety that they had received notification from Florida authorities about his conviction, and that he had to register with the state. But, records also show that the department of public safety informed him later that month that they had determined that, per state law, he was not required to register as a sex offender in New Mexico.

Newly released files also include a 2019 FBI tip report stating that a “retired new mexico state police officer” – whose name is redacted – reported hearing “rumors” that the ranch was “used for recruited girls to visit with Epstein” but the FBI stated that he had “no factual evidence to support this claim”. The retired police officer also said that there had been a lot of “high profile people seen frequenting the property” and raised concerns about a newly constructed barn on the land.

Aside from the 2019 investigation opened by the New Mexico attorney general’s office, but later put on hold at the behest of federal authorities, there appears to be no active state or local criminal investigations into what occurred at Zorro ranch, according to local prosecutors at the Santa Fe county sheriff’s office, and the state department of justice.

But state officials are pushing for answers about what occurred there.

Late last year, state lawmakers proposed a bipartisan “truth commission” to investigate what happened at the ranch. The state department of justice said it was working with the lawmakers.

“This commission will specifically seek the truth about what officials knew, how crimes were unreported or reported, and how the state can ensure that this essentially never happens again,” Democratic state representative Andrea Romero of Santa Fe, who is leading the efforts, told a panel of legislators in November. “There’s no complete record of what occurred.”

Romero told the Guardian that, based on conversations with law enforcement and the attorney general’s office, it is her understanding that federal agents never searched the ranch.

...

The commission could be greenlighted by the state house as early as next week, she said.

For now, the story of Epstein’s New Mexico ranch remains told in fragments: survivors’ accounts, property listings and land records, as well as a growing archive of documents released by the Department of Justice.

Among them are emails from 2011 showing that Epstein commissioned a $2,000 reproduction of The Massacre of the Innocents, by the Dutch painter Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem. The tableau depicts a biblical massacre of all male children in Bethlehem under age two.

“It’s the large 9’x9’ canvas that we had rolled out for him to see in the entry way where they are killing babies,” one of Epstein’s assistants writes to another one of his employees, to arrange shipping. Epstein, she said, “wants to use it on the ranch”.

————

“From New York to New Mexico: new Epstein files shed light on his sprawling ranch outside Santa Fe” by Anna Betts and Victoria Bekiempis; The Guardian; 02/08/2026

“Romero told the Guardian that, based on conversations with law enforcement and the attorney general’s office, it is her understanding that federal agents never searched the ranch.”

The ranch was never searched by federal agents. Not once. That’s the understanding of Andrea Romero, the state representative who, as we saw above, is now leading the truth commission. Notably, the ranch was apparently the subject of the original federal investigation into Epstein back in 2007 when the FBI interviewed the ranch manager. An interview that was apparently ended abruptly after someone called the staff and instructed them that “they were no longer allowed to speak with us”, according to the investigator. And that was it. The FBI appears to have had no other interest in the property after that abrupt ending of those interviews. Flash forward to 2019 and we an see how a tip from a “retired new mexico state police officer” about the abuses at the ranch were dismissed by the FBI that the tip had “no factual evidence to support this claim”:

...
While Epstein’s activities at Zorro ranch remained hidden from public view, records recently released by the Department of Justice indicate that federal authorities briefly took an interest in the property almost 20 years ago.

In February 2007, as part of an investigation of child sexual abuse in Florida, records show that the FBI interviewed Epstein’s ranch manager at the New Mexico property.

Per the document, the ranch manager told the FBI that he and his wife had overseen the property for about four years, and that Epstein typically spent several weeks there in the summer, often accompanied by “his personal assistant, his bodyguard, friends, personal trainer, and sometimes his masseuses”.

The interview ended abruptly, according to the agent. The investigator wrote that someone called the staff and instructed them that “they were no longer allowed to speak with us”.

“The interview was immediately ended,” the report notes.

Other than that, Epstein and his ranch appeared to have drawn little law enforcement scrutiny before his death. The Santa Fe county sheriff’s office, which has jurisdiction over the ranch, had records of several incidents on or around the property; none were related to alleged sexual abuse.

...

Newly released files also include a 2019 FBI tip report stating that a “retired new mexico state police officer” – whose name is redacted – reported hearing “rumors” that the ranch was “used for recruited girls to visit with Epstein” but the FBI stated that he had “no factual evidence to support this claim”. The retired police officer also said that there had been a lot of “high profile people seen frequenting the property” and raised concerns about a newly constructed barn on the land.

Aside from the 2019 investigation opened by the New Mexico attorney general’s office, but later put on hold at the behest of federal authorities, there appears to be no active state or local criminal investigations into what occurred at Zorro ranch, according to local prosecutors at the Santa Fe county sheriff’s office, and the state department of justice.
...

Notably, it appears that Deutsche Bank made a pledge of $4.95 million back in 2023 to “fund additional resources to prevent, investigate, and prosecute human trafficking in the state of New Mexico”, stemming from an investigation into “various financial services companies and the role they played in failing to identify the sexual abuse and trafficking of underage girls” at the ranch. It’s unclear if that funding is playing or role in the truth commission of what, if anything, came of it:

...
The property was sold in 2023 to an LLC listed as San Rafael Ranch LLC. Later that year, the New Mexico attorney general, Raúl Torrez, announced a $4.95m pledge by Deutsche Bank – which, earlier that year, had agreed to pay $75m to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of women who accused the German lender of helping facilitate Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations – to “fund additional resources to prevent, investigate, and prosecute human trafficking in the state of New Mexico”.

The funding, officials said, stemmed from an investigation Torrez conducted into “various financial services companies and the role they played in failing to identify the sexual abuse and trafficking of underage girls” at Zorro ranch.
...

And note how the truth commission was set up not just to get to the truth of Epstein’s crimes, but also what officials knew, how crimes were unreported or reported. It’s an investigation of the investigation. At least that’s the declared intent of the commission:

...
But state officials are pushing for answers about what occurred there.

Late last year, state lawmakers proposed a bipartisan “truth commission” to investigate what happened at the ranch. The state department of justice said it was working with the lawmakers.

“This commission will specifically seek the truth about what officials knew, how crimes were unreported or reported, and how the state can ensure that this essentially never happens again,” Democratic state representative Andrea Romero of Santa Fe, who is leading the efforts, told a panel of legislators in November. “There’s no complete record of what occurred.”
...

And that brings us to the array of victims who have made allegations involving the ranch. Starting with Virginia Giuffre, whose allegations included abuse by not just Epstein at the ranch but other powerful men including former governor Bill Richardson. It’s the kind of allegation that, if true, gives us an idea of basis for the apparent political protection Epstein had in the state:

...
Virginia Giuffre, one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, was among those who said they were victimized at the ranch. Giuffre, who sued Maxwell for defamation after the British socialite accused her of lying, provided photos of herself at the ranch in a 2015 court document.

Giuffre said that Epstein trafficked her to powerful men at the ranch, including the late Bill Richardson, who served as New Mexico governor from 2003 to 2011.

A spokesperson for Richardson, who died in 2023, previously said that the former governor never met Giuffre and that “these allegations and inferences are completely false” and that in his “limited interactions with Mr Epstein, he never saw him in the presence of young or underage girls”.
...

And then there’s the allegations from one of the victims for the elite Interlochan Center for the Arts in Michigan about traveling to places like New York City and New Mexico, where she was abused. As we saw, Epstein’s ties to the Interlochen campus was established in the early 90s, and as we saw above, he purchased the ranch in 1993. So when we see how “Jane” first met Epstein in 1994 and was abused at the ranch, it becomes clear that the abuses at the ranch started almost immediately:

...
Multiple women have said that Epstein abused them as teen girls or young adults on his New Mexico ranch.

Among them is Jane, the first accuser to testify at Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial. Jane said that she met Epstein in 1994 while attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts, an esteemed youth arts camp in Michigan. When Maxwell and Epstein learned that Jane was from Palm Beach, they requested her mother’s phone number, she testified.

Jane provided them with her mom’s contact information. When Jane returned from Interlochen, she and her mother were invited to tea.

She started spending time with Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein started to sexually abuse Jane when she was 14.

Jane said that she traveled with Epstein and Maxwell to New York City and New Mexico. “I just remember someone, at one point, just came into [my] room and said: ‘Jeffrey wants to see you,’ and then escorted me to see him,” she said. “I just, as usual, felt, like, my heart sink into my stomach, you know.”
...

And when we see Annie Farmer’s testimony about the abuses she experienced at the ranch, recall how Farmer, her sister, and her mother all tried to warn the world about Epstein back in 2003 when they spoke with Vanity Fair reporter Vicki Ward about Epstein for Ward’s 2003 expose, but Ward’s editor pulled their allegations from the piece. Epstein’s seemingly untouchable status was already established by that point:

...
Annie Farmer, the fourth accuser to testify at Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, said that the British socialite gave her a nude massage at the ranch when she was 16.

During Maxwell’s trial, Farmer testified that the morning after this encounter with Maxwell, Epstein lumbered into bed with her and said he “wanted to cuddle” and she “felt kind of frozen”.
...

And as we can see in the following piece, the survivors didn’t simply make one allegation after another about abuses at the ranch. Many have already told members of the truth commission that ‘New Mexico was basically the worst’:

Santa Fe New Mexican

‘New Mexico was basically the worst,’ Epstein survivors told lawmaker

By Daniel J. Chacón
dchacon@sfnewmexican.com
Feb 26, 2026

A state lawmaker who is one of the architects of a commission investigating criminal activity at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch said she spoke with survivors of the convicted sex offender ahead of the State of the Union on Tuesday.

...

“They said among the things that were happening with Jeffrey Epstein and his whole operation in various states, that New Mexico was basically the worst,” Rep. Andrea Romero said during Thursday’s recording of Around the Roundhouse, The New Mexican’s political podcast.

Romero, a Santa Fe Democrat who was in Washington the day of President Donald Trump’s annual address as a guest of U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, said she met around eight to 10 survivors. At least three had been to New Mexico, she said.

“We didn’t really speak about specifics,” Romero said in a follow-up interview. “It was mostly introductions.”

During the podcast, Romero said their conversations were limited during a whirlwind day where “there were lots of reporters wanting to speak to victims” and she didn’t know exactly what they meant when they called New Mexico the worst.

“We’ve heard horrible things from different accounts,” Romero said. “But the fact that this was never investigated, the fact that this was really pushed aside from all of the other investigations, just sets off alarm bells for so many.”

The New Mexico Department of Justice said earlier this month it was reopening its criminal investigation into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, amid mounting public pressure and after the review of new information on Epstein released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The agency, formerly known as the Attorney General’s Office, closed its investigation in 2019 “at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice for the Southern District of New York,” a department spokesperson wrote in an email earlier this month.

“Revelations outlined in the previously sealed FBI files warrant further examination,” the spokesperson wrote.

Romero said the so-called truth commission, which was established under a resolution passed by the state House of Representatives during the 30-day session that ended last week, has already started to collaborate with the state Department of Justice — and tips are starting to roll in.

...

Romero expressed concerns that changes at the ranch after it was purchased by businessman and former Texas state Sen. Don Huffines and his family could impede the commission’s investigation. The New Mexican reported this week that state and county officials ordered a pause on construction on a new front gate due to lack of permits.

Officials are investigating whether any other construction work at the property, which the new owners renamed San Rafael Ranch, has occurred. Huffines, who is running for Texas state comptroller, said earlier this month that he planned on turning the property into a Christian retreat and that he would cooperate with authorities.

“When we’re talking about a potential crime scene that never had an investigation, it’s very critical that we know what changes were made, especially if we’re trying [to corroborate] information from victims who may have suffered there, and the walls have changed or the elements of what may have been may have shifted,” she said. “So, it’s really important for us to get some clarity on what changes have [happened], especially if they went unpermitted.”

Any construction changes could potentially compromise an investigation, she said.

———–

“ ‘New Mexico was basically the worst,’ Epstein survivors told lawmaker” By Daniel J. Chacón; Santa Fe New Mexican; 02/26/2026

““They said among the things that were happening with Jeffrey Epstein and his whole operation in various states, that New Mexico was basically the worst,” Rep. Andrea Romero said during Thursday’s recording of Around the Roundhouse, The New Mexican’s political podcast.”

New Mexico was basically the worst. That’s the summary provided by Rep Romero, the current leader of the truth commission. The worst location in the Epstein abuse saga was never actually investigated:

...
“We’ve heard horrible things from different accounts,” Romero said. “But the fact that this was never investigated, the fact that this was really pushed aside from all of the other investigations, just sets off alarm bells for so many.”

The New Mexico Department of Justice said earlier this month it was reopening its criminal investigation into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, amid mounting public pressure and after the review of new information on Epstein released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
...

Lastly, note how state and county officials recently had to order a pause on construction on a new front gate due to lack of permits, raising concerns about what other construction work at the property may have occurred without a permit too:

...
Romero expressed concerns that changes at the ranch after it was purchased by businessman and former Texas state Sen. Don Huffines and his family could impede the commission’s investigation. The New Mexican reported this week that state and county officials ordered a pause on construction on a new front gate due to lack of permits.

Officials are investigating whether any other construction work at the property, which the new owners renamed San Rafael Ranch, has occurred. Huffines, who is running for Texas state comptroller, said earlier this month that he planned on turning the property into a Christian retreat and that he would cooperate with authorities.

“When we’re talking about a potential crime scene that never had an investigation, it’s very critical that we know what changes were made, especially if we’re trying [to corroborate] information from victims who may have suffered there, and the walls have changed or the elements of what may have been may have shifted,” she said. “So, it’s really important for us to get some clarity on what changes have [happened], especially if they went unpermitted.”

Any construction changes could potentially compromise an investigation, she said.
...

Will the long-overdue investigation of the property finally happen now that this truth commission is underway? Let’s hope so. But we probably shouldn’t be expecting any new major revelations. Unless learning about a mass destruction of the evidence counts as a revelation. Either way, it’s hard to think of a more disturbing location for a Christian camp. Well, ok, Epstein’s Island would probably be a more disturbing location, but that’s apparently going to be turned into a luxury resort.

One new twist in the latest scandal is the fact that the texts have apparently prompted some sort of criminal investigation. That criminal investigation, in turn, is apparently serving as a block on the release of further texts. The nature of the criminal investigation isn’t clear, but as we’re going to see, it’s not like there’s a lack of potentially criminal content. Like the calls for the crucifying, beheading, and dissecting black people by chat member William Bejerano. Bejerano actually showed up in the news last year complaining about the obstacles he was running into when attempting to start a Miami-Dade College chapter of the Students for Life of American pro-life group. Notably, it turns out the president of Students for Life of American is Kristan Hawkins, herself a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP). So the guy calling for a the crucifying, beheading, and dissecting black people is CNP-aligned. Imagine that.

As we’ll see, Bejerano’s calls for extreme violence yielded a “How edgy,” response from Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time for the FIU campus. At another point, Gonzalez warned chat members to “avoid the coloreds like the plague” and even warned FIU’s TPUSA chapter president Ian Valdes that he can sleep with Jewish women but should avoid procreating with them. Valdes responded with “I would def not marry a Jew,” and went on to make a joke about “gooning in Agartha”. Gonzalez proceeded to explain to the chat group that Agartha is a kind of “Nazi heaven”. As extremist researcher Heidi Beirich observed, “It was something Himmler was obsessed about and it’s basically a mythical white homeland in the center of the Earth. If you’re using the term Agartha, you have spent some time reading about white supremacy and Nazis, there’s just no way around it.”

The chat group was started by Abel Carvajal, the secretary of the county’s Republican Party. While Carvajal now claims to have been unaware of the nature of the chats, it’s also the case that he deleted 14 messages sent by other participants in the chat and 42 of his own messages before the media obtained the logs. It’s also the case that these logs only covered a two and a half week period. So in just that two and a half week period there calls for mass violence against black people and references to Nazi heaven. It also sounds like the n‑word was used over 400 times, with Bejerano being the primary source. Gonzalez apparently preferred using the term “coloreds” instead.

Another very notable affiliation of Ian Valdes is that he previously described himself as a “campaign employee” for the gubernatorial bid of James Fishback. As we’ll see, while Fishback may only be polling in the single digits in the ongoing Republican primary race, he’s actually far more popular among 18–34 conservative voters than the current front-runner, Bryon Donalds. Disturbingly, Fishback’s popularity with conservative youth appears to be rooted in the fact that he’s not afraid to publicly pal around with popular Nazi-adjacent figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. As Tucker Carlson put it after an interview with Fishback back in January, “Pretty soon, all winning Republicans will talk just like him.”

Tellingly, when Fishback trolled his primary opponent by calling on Donalds — who is African American — to prove he’s “actually black”, Donalds’s response wasn’t to point out Fishback’s blatant open racism. “You’re no racist,” Donalds wrote on X.com. “You’re no groyper. You’re no anti-semite.” Yes, Donalds’s retort was to claim that Fishback wasn’t a sincere racist troll. He was just play acting. This is where we are.

That’s all part of the context of the latest Republican Nazi youth scandal. The kind of story we’ve heard before and will undoubtedly hear about again. Largely because it’s barely a story at this point. We’re long past the white nationalist infiltration phase of the Republican Party. The takeover is complete. It’s just how things are now, at least behind-the-scenes. And have been for a while:

Miami Herald

‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat

By Claire Heddles
This story was originally published March 4, 2026 at 7:39 PM.
Updated March 5, 2026 3:16 PM

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n‑word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

Interspersed throughout were discussions about events promoting the Republican Party at Florida International University. The school told the Herald the chat logs are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair.

...

Another member of the chat, William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n‑word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n‑word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people. Bejerano hung up the phone when reached by the Herald.

Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, responded in the chat: “How edgy.”

“Ew you had colored professors?!” Gonzalez wrote at another point. “I reguse [sic] to be indoctrinated by the coloreds.” He told the group he used the term “colored” because, “I was told we cant say black anymore.” A couple days later, he added: “Avoid the coloreds like the plague.” He did not respond to a request for comment.

The group chat members — which included some women — also frequently discussed sex, sometimes describing women as “whores” and at one point using the k‑word, a slur for Jewish people, to describe women they avoid.

Gonzalez said, “You can f–k all the [k‑word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”

A few minutes later, Valdes changed the group chat’s name from one that included a slur for people with disabilities, “Uber [r‑word] Yapping,” to “Gooning in Agartha.”

Gooning is a slang term for male masturbation. Agartha, a mythical white civilization promoted by the Nazi politician Heinrich Himmler, has been repopularized by the young online right.

Gonzalez described Agartha to the group chat as, “Nazi heaven sort of,” and Valdes explained it, “esoteric nazism essentially.”

“This is not something you would know about unless you had spent a considerable amount of time in white supremacist circles,” said Heidi Beirich, who researches extremism and co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

“It was something Himmler was obsessed about and it’s basically a mythical white homeland in the center of the Earth. If you’re using the term Agartha, you have spent some time reading about white supremacy and Nazis, there’s just no way around it,” she said. “You’re embedded in the culture.”

...

Valdes wrote at one point, “We need to have a moratorium on immigration temporarily unless it’s someone from a first world country.” He then clarified: “Yeah I obviously mean whites.”

Throughout the two and a half weeks of chat logs between September and October obtained by the Herald, the secretary of the county’s Republican Party, Abel Carvajal, participated occasionally and deleted some messages, but didn’t shut the chat down.

Republican Party divisions

The messages among the party’s top campus leaders last fall reveal the extent to which the party is splintered by its extremist online right and concerned about their growing political power in Florida.

Leading Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who is Black, denounced what he called the “woke right” during a speech in Miami last fall, a phenomenon he said has risen in the wake of the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Donalds seemed to be using the term as a stand-in for the far right, describing it as those that oppose all immigration and espouse “soft bigotry” on social media.

His opponent James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

One University of North Florida poll found that while only 6% of likely GOP primary voters supported Fishback, he had the support of 32% of 18–34 year olds, four times what Byron Donalds got among that age group.

“One thing I know is the conservative movement has always been steeped in respect for other people, respect for religious liberty, respect for economic liberty,” Donalds told reporters during a campaign stop in Miami this week.

...

“I’m more authoritarian than you buddy, I think the church should run the government,” Valdes wrote at one point. During another conversation, Valdes said, “fiscally conservative all the way is so gay” and “Hitler himself wasn’t a fiscal conservative.”

Valdes previously described himself as a “campaign employee” on Fishback’s Miami team on Instagram. He has since removed that title. He did not respond to texts or phone calls from the Herald.

In response to questions about the group chats, Miami-Dade County Republican Party Chairman Kevin Cooper said “anyone associated with this chat should resign immediately.”

He added, “I am shocked and appalled at these statements. Racism and antisemitism have no place in the Republican Party. I am proud to be the first Jewish chairman of the Miami Dade Republican Party, which is comprised of a diverse group of members from every race and background.”

The messages between campus conservative leaders come in the wake of Florida barring certain conversations about race and racism in university classrooms, including the 2022 so-called “Stop WOKE Act.”

“With the legislation that’s being passed in different states, including here in Florida — and you could argue even with some of them Trump executive orders about race he signed immediately after being sworn into office — I think it’s sending a signal that you don’t have to hide your racism anymore,” said University of Florida political scientist Sharon Austin.

The result, she said, is the emboldening of the Florida students who hold discriminatory views and a silencing of those teaching against them at Florida’s public schools.

Beirich, the extremism researcher, said the signals from the highest ranks of the Republican party from the White House — including social media posts echoing white supremacists messages — are being heard across the party.

“Clearly the Trump administration doesn’t have any problem with these extremist views, so we shouldn’t be surprised that young Republicans would be trading in this stuff,” Beirich said. “It’s being sanctioned by the highest office, it’s not disqualifying anymore in the GOP.”

Creator of the chat responds

Carvajal — the county party secretary who started the chat and is a third year law student at FIU — said that he had not seen much of the content in the group chat until he was contacted by the Herald about the logs last week.

When he opened WhatsApp on his phone and scrolled up to the conversations last fall while on a call with a Herald reporter, Carvajal said he was shocked by the gruesome calls for violence against Black people.

“It’s been five months since this was sent and this is the first time I’ve seen this message,” Carvajal said. “I guess to an extent, I bear some responsibility, cause I created a chat. But if I had seen this at the moment, I would have removed [Bejerano] from the chat. I probably would have even blocked his number.”

He said he generally ignored the thousands of messages in the group, and logs show he did not participate as much as others. But the county party official, who was the most senior Republican political leader in the chat, was not entirely absent either.

The WhatsApp logs show Carvajal deleted a total 14 messages sent by other participants in the chat and 42 of his own messages before the Herald obtained the logs, so the full extent of his participation is not clear. He said many of the messages he deleted were flashy stickers and he was “decluttering the chat.”

Carvajal said he created the group after Kirk was killed and the campus’ Turning Point USA chat was limited to administrators only.

...

Not the first time

When the Herald asked the school’s police department for any records related to the new group chats, a private law firm contracted by the school said they are unavailable because they “constitute Criminal Investigative Information.”

In a statement about the chat logs, media relations director Madeline Baró said, “The university takes very seriously any allegation of discriminatory conduct. The alleged conduct is under review and will be addressed in accordance with the university’s policies and applicable law.”

FIU and its Turning Point chapter have had a group chat problem before. In 2018, chat logs obtained by the Miami New Times in a group called “TPUSA FIU Fun” included messages joking about rape, liking cartoon pornography featuring drawings of underaged girls and reminding members to not be racist and anti-Semitic.

At the time, 75 faculty signed on to a letter calling on the school’s administration to revoke the organizational status of the campus’ Turning Point USA chapter.

“This is an appalling set of practices that go well beyond any reasonable interpretation of ‘free speech,’” faculty wrote. The school’s Student Government Association overwhelmingly passed a resolution asking for the removal of any “recognition, presence, funding and privileges” for Turning Point USA.

The campus still has an active TPUSA chapter.

At one point in the group chats last fall, various members debated how to describe a woman, with Gonzalez, the former recruitment chair, using terms like “half breed” and “mongrel,” to which Valdes, the Turning Point chapter president, responded, “If this chat gets leaked we’re so cooked lmao.”

“This isnt even my worst one,” Gonzalez responded.

Valdes said: “I’m in a few on telegram that are definitely worse.”

———

“‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat ” By Claire Heddles; Miami Herald; 03/04/2026

“The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair.”

The “Nazi heaven” chat group wasn’t a bunch of campus GOP interns. Some of Miami-Dade County’s top party officials were involved, along with Florida International University’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair. And this glimpse into that chat was just for two and a half weeks, with variations of the n‑word more than 400 times. How much worse is the rest of the chat?

...
In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n‑word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

...

Throughout the two and a half weeks of chat logs between September and October obtained by the Herald, the secretary of the county’s Republican Party, Abel Carvajal, participated occasionally and deleted some messages, but didn’t shut the chat down.
...

And then there’s the fact that this is apparently being treated as a criminal investigation at this point. Again, just how bad was the rest of the chat logs that the media didn’t get to see?

...
Interspersed throughout were discussions about events promoting the Republican Party at Florida International University. The school told the Herald the chat logs are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

...

When the Herald asked the school’s police department for any records related to the new group chats, a private law firm contracted by the school said they are unavailable because they “constitute Criminal Investigative Information.”

In a statement about the chat logs, media relations director Madeline Baró said, “The university takes very seriously any allegation of discriminatory conduct. The alleged conduct is under review and will be addressed in accordance with the university’s policies and applicable law.”
...

And then there’s the deleted messages. Even Abel Carvajal, the secretary of the county’s Republican Party who started the chat, was deleting messages. Both his own messages and other participants’ messages. How bad did it have to get for a message to be deleted from a chat group like this? All indications are it’s worse than what we’ve been shown:

...
Carvajal — the county party secretary who started the chat and is a third year law student at FIU — said that he had not seen much of the content in the group chat until he was contacted by the Herald about the logs last week.

When he opened WhatsApp on his phone and scrolled up to the conversations last fall while on a call with a Herald reporter, Carvajal said he was shocked by the gruesome calls for violence against Black people.

“It’s been five months since this was sent and this is the first time I’ve seen this message,” Carvajal said. “I guess to an extent, I bear some responsibility, cause I created a chat. But if I had seen this at the moment, I would have removed [Bejerano] from the chat. I probably would have even blocked his number.”

He said he generally ignored the thousands of messages in the group, and logs show he did not participate as much as others. But the county party official, who was the most senior Republican political leader in the chat, was not entirely absent either.

The WhatsApp logs show Carvajal deleted a total 14 messages sent by other participants in the chat and 42 of his own messages before the Herald obtained the logs, so the full extent of his participation is not clear. He said many of the messages he deleted were flashy stickers and he was “decluttering the chat.”

Carvajal said he created the group after Kirk was killed and the campus’ Turning Point USA chat was limited to administrators only.
...

And those questions about how much worse did this chat actually get brings us to the posts by William Bejerano, who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College. At one point Bejerano made calls for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people including crucifying, beheading, and dissecting people. Were these the messages that prompted the criminal investigation? Either way, it’s rather remarkable that they didn’t bother deleting the calls for crucifying, beheading, and dissecting Black people. Also note that the particular pro-life organization that Bejerano tried to start, Students for Life of America, has CNP member Kristan Hawkins as its president. So the guy advocating acts of extreme violence against black people tried to start campus chapter of a CNP-affiliated organization. Because of course:

...
Another member of the chat, William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n‑word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n‑word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people. Bejerano hung up the phone when reached by the Herald.

Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, responded in the chat: “How edgy.”

“Ew you had colored professors?!” Gonzalez wrote at another point. “I reguse [sic] to be indoctrinated by the coloreds.” He told the group he used the term “colored” because, “I was told we cant say black anymore.” A couple days later, he added: “Avoid the coloreds like the plague.” He did not respond to a request for comment.
...

And then there’s the “Nazi heaven” comments from Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, who used to the term to describe the esoteric Nazi concept of Agartha. Notably, Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, followed up by explaining to the group how Agartha was “esoteric nazism essentially.” Which makes this a good time to recall that story from back in 2018, when the Miami New Times published a slew of leaked texts between members of the Florida International University TPUSA chapter, filled with Nazi-like content. In other words, this latest story is pretty much just confirmation of what we should have long suspected was the case. And when Valdez quips about how “I’m in a few on telegram that are definitely worse,” we should probably take him at his word:

...
The group chat members — which included some women — also frequently discussed sex, sometimes describing women as “whores” and at one point using the k‑word, a slur for Jewish people, to describe women they avoid.

Gonzalez said, “You can f–k all the [k‑word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”

A few minutes later, Valdes changed the group chat’s name from one that included a slur for people with disabilities, “Uber [r‑word] Yapping,” to “Gooning in Agartha.”

Gooning is a slang term for male masturbation. Agartha, a mythical white civilization promoted by the Nazi politician Heinrich Himmler, has been repopularized by the young online right.

Gonzalez described Agartha to the group chat as, “Nazi heaven sort of,” and Valdes explained it, “esoteric nazism essentially.”

“This is not something you would know about unless you had spent a considerable amount of time in white supremacist circles,” said Heidi Beirich, who researches extremism and co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

“It was something Himmler was obsessed about and it’s basically a mythical white homeland in the center of the Earth. If you’re using the term Agartha, you have spent some time reading about white supremacy and Nazis, there’s just no way around it,” she said. “You’re embedded in the culture.”

...

FIU and its Turning Point chapter have had a group chat problem before. In 2018, chat logs obtained by the Miami New Times in a group called “TPUSA FIU Fun” included messages joking about rape, liking cartoon pornography featuring drawings of underaged girls and reminding members to not be racist and anti-Semitic.

At the time, 75 faculty signed on to a letter calling on the school’s administration to revoke the organizational status of the campus’ Turning Point USA chapter.

“This is an appalling set of practices that go well beyond any reasonable interpretation of ‘free speech,’” faculty wrote. The school’s Student Government Association overwhelmingly passed a resolution asking for the removal of any “recognition, presence, funding and privileges” for Turning Point USA.

The campus still has an active TPUSA chapter.

At one point in the group chats last fall, various members debated how to describe a woman, with Gonzalez, the former recruitment chair, using terms like “half breed” and “mongrel,” to which Valdes, the Turning Point chapter president, responded, “If this chat gets leaked we’re so cooked lmao.”

“This isnt even my worst one,” Gonzalez responded.

Valdes said: “I’m in a few on telegram that are definitely worse.”
...

And while we’ve been getting reports about Nazi chats from FIU’s Republicans and TPUSA chapter for years now, there is one huge difference between the stories today and the stories from years past: the DeSantis administration’s ‘anti-Woke’ purge of Florida’s education system, concocted and executed in close coordination for the Council for National Policy (CNP). It’s the kind of overall political environment that could have only encouraged these chat participants with the knowledge that the governor is a champion of using the power of the state to silence their ideological adversaries:

...
The messages between campus conservative leaders come in the wake of Florida barring certain conversations about race and racism in university classrooms, including the 2022 so-called “Stop WOKE Act.”

“With the legislation that’s being passed in different states, including here in Florida — and you could argue even with some of them Trump executive orders about race he signed immediately after being sworn into office — I think it’s sending a signal that you don’t have to hide your racism anymore,” said University of Florida political scientist Sharon Austin.

The result, she said, is the emboldening of the Florida students who hold discriminatory views and a silencing of those teaching against them at Florida’s public schools.
...

But figures like Ian Valdes aren’t just necessarily wearing one cap in the fascist Republican ecosystem. Valdes is apparently a “campaign employee” for Jame Fishback’s gubernatorial bid. And while Fishback appears to be a long shot for winning the GOP primary, he’s clearly the Republican youth vote favorite. Which raises all sorts of disturbing question about what the Fishback campaign’s group chats look like:

...
Leading Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who is Black, denounced what he called the “woke right” during a speech in Miami last fall, a phenomenon he said has risen in the wake of the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Donalds seemed to be using the term as a stand-in for the far right, describing it as those that oppose all immigration and espouse “soft bigotry” on social media.

His opponent James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

One University of North Florida poll found that while only 6% of likely GOP primary voters supported Fishback, he had the support of 32% of 18–34 year olds, four times what Byron Donalds got among that age group.

...

“I’m more authoritarian than you buddy, I think the church should run the government,” Valdes wrote at one point. During another conversation, Valdes said, “fiscally conservative all the way is so gay” and “Hitler himself wasn’t a fiscal conservative.”

Valdes previously described himself as a “campaign employee” on Fishback’s Miami team on Instagram. He has since removed that title. He did not respond to texts or phone calls from the Herald.
...

And that fun fact about Ian Valdes, FIU’s TPUSA chapter president, and his status as a James Fishback campaign employee brings us to the following article about the ongoing race in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary, where Fishback is proving to the world that publicly palling around with figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes isn’t a liability. Instead, it’s how you market yourself to today’s conservative youth:

Vanity Fair

James Fishback Has Seized the Gen Z Right. Now He Thinks He Can Win Florida.

“We’ve broken into the mainstream,” the long-shot Republican candidate for governor tells Vanity Fair, as influencers from Andrew Tate to Nick Fuentes line up behind him.

By Dan Adler
March 11, 2026

His Black opponent will be sent back to the “ghetto.” “Goyslop,” an antisemitic slang term for junk food, will be banned from school cafeterias. “These hoes”—OnlyFans creators—will “owe taxes.”

The provocations of 31-year-old Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback’s campaign promises are cartoonish—and he is running against a Donald Trump–backed Republican congressman, Byron Donalds, who is far outpolling him in the primary race to replace Governor Ron DeSantis—but they have helped him make significant inroads with a who’s who of the rising faces of the young and far-right. As Tucker Carlson’s show put it after his interview with Fishback in January, “Pretty soon, all winning Republicans will talk just like him.”

Fishback has won the endorsement of Andrew Tate, the accused rapist and sex trafficker who, at 39 years old, represents an elder statesman in the fraught, sprawling ecosystem of new media made by and for young men. (Tate has denied any wrongdoing.) Nick Fuentes, the prominent white nationalist streamer, has called Fishback “really smart” and praised his social media savvy. The candidate has captured the most extreme attitudinal aspects of the Gen Z online right, and a leading Miami livestreaming personality has referred to his home state simply as “Fishback Florida.”

“We’ve broken into the mainstream,” Fishback said in a recent interview, citing “people who have told me, who are in their late 20s, early 30s, that I’m going to be the first person they ever vote for.”

...

Fishback tells Vanity Fair that his plan is to increase under-35 turnout by five times in the Republican primary, “because the denominator is so freaking low to begin with.” He is running on a platform of affordability and hardline immigration restriction, appealing to a broad sense of decline and degradation among young men in particular. He credits his breakthrough to meeting people where they were. Fuentes has offered Fishback’s more positive poll results as proof of the strength of his own following, the Groypers, while declining to endorse him in an effort to stanch the candidate’s toxicity. While Fishback rejects the label he’s received as the first Groyper candidate, he could see the advantages of the association. “A lot of the people who watch Nick Fuentes,” Fishback says, “that may be the only political personality they follow.”

Even by the rowdy standards of Florida politics, Fishback entered the race with an uncommon amount of baggage. After he dropped out of Georgetown University, he took a short-lived detour to Wall Street, which culminated in a dispute with his hedge fund employer. He ultimately admitted to sharing confidential information and was left with a $229,000-and-counting legal bill, and the repossession of his Tesla. A Florida school district cut ties with him after a woman who had been a student in a high-school debate program he was running accused him of initiating a romantic relationship with her when she was 17 and he was 27. (The woman filed for an order of protection last year and was denied. Fishback has denied any wrongdoing, saying, “I have never been arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime.”)

As he’s gained traction in a constellation of online spaces where racial slurs flow freely, Fishback has ratcheted up his most incendiary stunts. He recently posted a video of himself shooting a gun along with a demand that Donalds join him to prove that he is “actually black.” Fishback has brushed off accusations of racism, and tells me, “When they call me an antisemite for saying I want to divest taxpayer money from Israel, that just bolsters my base.”

...

Donalds, having raised $45 million to Fishback’s $19,000 as of January, has thus far largely steered clear of the fray, but when he did respond to a provocation on X in February, he offered a vexing view of the landscape by calling into question Fishback’s bigot bona fides.

“You’re no racist,” Donalds wrote. “You’re no groyper. You’re no anti-semite.”

...

The Groypers are Fuentes supporters above all, hewing to his opposition to multiculturalism; another I spoke with says that “Groyper-curious” or “Groyper-adjacent” might be a more apt descriptor for Fishback. He hasn’t shied away from the association, claiming on one occasion that he hung up on a donor who asked him to disavow Fuentes’s supporters, and signing a poster of the streamer bearing one of his trademark phrases that refers to a racial slur. When I mention the typical image of Fuentes supporters as basement-dwellers to Fishback, he pushes back. “I don’t think it’s a fair characterization of the men who watch Nick Fuentes because a lot of them are well-spoken,” he says. “A lot of them may live with their parents because they’re 17 or 18 years old.”

In January, Fishback made a campaign appearance on a video call with two Fuentes affiliates, Clavicular and Sneako, who nodded along gamely as he discussed his proposal for a 50% so-called sin tax on OnlyFans creators. The two men, 20 and 27, are among the leading personalities in a set of young, gonzo livestreamers that has recently exploded into mainstream consciousness.

A fan page on X announced in February that California governor Gavin Newsom, whom Clavicular prefers to Vice President JD Vance owing to his good looks, had acknowledged the streamer and his signature self-improvement patois. “Looksmaxxing,” “bonesmashing,” and his related theories of physical attractiveness have been newly decoded in national press coverage and trickled all the way up to the White House’s AI and crypto czar. Sneako, a regular companion of the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, attended Trump’s inaugural festivities last year and smoked cigars with Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion during the final stretch of the mayor’s term. For fans of this world, it all compounded a level of personal investment that is traditionally reserved for reality television, and Fishback had now joined the cast.

...

Where Trump had courted a raucous crew of comedian-podcasters, Fishback is seeking out an online milieu that makes them look tame. In December, he rose to Clavicular’s defense, declaring that the streamer “did nothing wrong” after a surreal and troubling Miami livestream during which he appeared to run a person over with his Tesla Cybertruck. A former high school debate standout who favors a snappy suede jacket, Fishback can scan as an academic interloper, but his easy presence among this crowd functioned as something of an imprimatur. He tells me he felt comfortable during another recent stream with Sneako, saying, “I’m a 31-year-old who grew up in South Florida who was a freestyle rapper in high school.”

In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair last year, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles offered a term for “the people that are sort of new to our world” whom she saw as the bloc of voters disproportionately powering interest in the Jeffrey Epstein story: “the Joe Rogan listeners.” Among a new wave of outsider media figures, Fuentes in particular has proven to be a more enduring and ubiquitous force than commonly expected. Chicago magazine recently ranked him as the city’s seventh most powerful figure, just below the mayor, and he has been one of Trump’s loudest critics on the right. Increasingly, Fuentes is in conversation with the class of comedians and podcasters, including Shane Gillis and Theo Von, who broke through establishment doors with Netflix and Spotify deals. During a December conversation with Gillis, Rogan said he admired Fuentes’s sense of humor and “very high verbal IQ,” and suggested that “he could probably win [a presidential election] in a few years”; some betting odds now have Fishback as the favorite to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience this year, a couple of spots ahead of Sam Altman.

The running joke among Fishback’s online detractors is that he is running for governor not of Florida, but of Kick, Rumble, or some other platform where white nationalist humor has real purchase among young men. He emphasizes that it is not just the far edge of the livestreaming set that he wants to reach—he had been getting the word out at Waffle Houses and on local and national news networks—though he notes, “I haven’t turned on the TV in over two years.” (Fishback claimed this month that his campaign has now been banned from Waffle House. He soon held an event at a Tampa Denny’s instead, which prompted Fuentes to remark on his show, “he’s a phenomenon…that Denny’s was packed.”)

In January, the largest names in this new-media corner—Fuentes, the Tate brothers, Sneako, Clavicular, and two other affiliated personalities—assembled at a Miami nightclub as a DJ played the Ye song “Heil Hitler,” with some in the group chanting along and raising Nazi salutes. The spectacle comported with the prevailing views of this ensemble’s antisemitism, but its sheer brazenness catapulted them to a new level of mainstream notoriety.

Fishback doubled down. In a livestream with Sneako last month, as the two men crossed the street against the light, he predicted, “The headline will read tomorrow, Florida gubernatorial candidate breaks the law with Hitler sympathizer.” It was a cheap spin on a cheap troll, but he had a point about the kind of press coverage the jarring novelty of his candidacy would receive. Later that day, as Fishback recorded a podcast interview with another of the Miami crew, as well as several of the OnlyFans creators whom he is seeking to tax, he described CNN and The New York Times as “fake news,” having been interviewed by reporters from those same outlets hours earlier.

“I understand that knee-jerk skepticism that ‘he’s another social media guy,’” Fishback says, describing the low-hanging criticism of himself. He promises that “in the unlikely event that I don’t win,” he wouldn’t start a podcast, and he took the sense that his campaign was “too online” as a compliment insofar as it could translate to on-the-ground momentum. As he saw it, he had located an untapped vein of influence.

...

———-

“James Fishback Has Seized the Gen Z Right. Now He Thinks He Can Win Florida.” By Dan Adler; Vanity Fair; 03/11/2026

“The provocations of 31-year-old Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback’s campaign promises are cartoonish—and he is running against a Donald Trump–backed Republican congressman, Byron Donalds, who is far outpolling him in the primary race to replace Governor Ron DeSantis—but they have helped him make significant inroads with a who’s who of the rising faces of the young and far-right. As Tucker Carlson’s show put it after his interview with Fishback in January, “Pretty soon, all winning Republicans will talk just like him.””

Tucker Carlson probably isn’t wrong about James Fishback’s future prospect. Given prevailing trends, all winning Republicans really will talk just like him. At least the winners of the Republican primaries. Whether or not Fishback’s open embrace of white nationalists and other extremist pop culture figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes will win in a general election remains to be seen. But he’s clearly tapped into the pulse of young conservatives today so it stands to reason Fishback really is the future of conservative politics:

...
Fishback has won the endorsement of Andrew Tate, the accused rapist and sex trafficker who, at 39 years old, represents an elder statesman in the fraught, sprawling ecosystem of new media made by and for young men. (Tate has denied any wrongdoing.) Nick Fuentes, the prominent white nationalist streamer, has called Fishback “really smart” and praised his social media savvy. The candidate has captured the most extreme attitudinal aspects of the Gen Z online right, and a leading Miami livestreaming personality has referred to his home state simply as “Fishback Florida.”

“We’ve broken into the mainstream,” Fishback said in a recent interview, citing “people who have told me, who are in their late 20s, early 30s, that I’m going to be the first person they ever vote for.”

...

Fishback tells Vanity Fair that his plan is to increase under-35 turnout by five times in the Republican primary, “because the denominator is so freaking low to begin with.” He is running on a platform of affordability and hardline immigration restriction, appealing to a broad sense of decline and degradation among young men in particular. He credits his breakthrough to meeting people where they were. Fuentes has offered Fishback’s more positive poll results as proof of the strength of his own following, the Groypers, while declining to endorse him in an effort to stanch the candidate’s toxicity. While Fishback rejects the label he’s received as the first Groyper candidate, he could see the advantages of the association. “A lot of the people who watch Nick Fuentes,” Fishback says, “that may be the only political personality they follow.”

...

In January, Fishback made a campaign appearance on a video call with two Fuentes affiliates, Clavicular and Sneako, who nodded along gamely as he discussed his proposal for a 50% so-called sin tax on OnlyFans creators. The two men, 20 and 27, are among the leading personalities in a set of young, gonzo livestreamers that has recently exploded into mainstream consciousness.

A fan page on X announced in February that California governor Gavin Newsom, whom Clavicular prefers to Vice President JD Vance owing to his good looks, had acknowledged the streamer and his signature self-improvement patois. “Looksmaxxing,” “bonesmashing,” and his related theories of physical attractiveness have been newly decoded in national press coverage and trickled all the way up to the White House’s AI and crypto czar. Sneako, a regular companion of the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, attended Trump’s inaugural festivities last year and smoked cigars with Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion during the final stretch of the mayor’s term. For fans of this world, it all compounded a level of personal investment that is traditionally reserved for reality television, and Fishback had now joined the cast.

...

In January, the largest names in this new-media corner—Fuentes, the Tate brothers, Sneako, Clavicular, and two other affiliated personalities—assembled at a Miami nightclub as a DJ played the Ye song “Heil Hitler,” with some in the group chanting along and raising Nazi salutes. The spectacle comported with the prevailing views of this ensemble’s antisemitism, but its sheer brazenness catapulted them to a new level of mainstream notoriety.
...

Finally, it’s hard not to marvel at the incredibly telling rebuttal by Byron Donalds to Fishback’s provocations like a demand to prove he is “actually black.” “You’re no racist,” Donalds wrote. “You’re no groyper. You’re no anti-semite.” Yes, Donalds’s retort was to assert that Fishback was a fake racist Groyper anti-semite:

...
As he’s gained traction in a constellation of online spaces where racial slurs flow freely, Fishback has ratcheted up his most incendiary stunts. He recently posted a video of himself shooting a gun along with a demand that Donalds join him to prove that he is “actually black.” Fishback has brushed off accusations of racism, and tells me, “When they call me an antisemite for saying I want to divest taxpayer money from Israel, that just bolsters my base.”

...

Donalds, having raised $45 million to Fishback’s $19,000 as of January, has thus far largely steered clear of the fray, but when he did respond to a provocation on X in February, he offered a vexing view of the landscape by calling into question Fishback’s bigot bona fides.

“You’re no racist,” Donalds wrote. “You’re no groyper. You’re no anti-semite.”
...

Time will tell if Fishback can somehow win this primary. But as Donalds’s pathetic response makes clear, Fishback and his Groyper fellow travelers have already won the culture war. At least when it comes to the behind-the-scenes culture of the Republican Party. A culture that getting less behind-the-scenes and more in-your-face with each successive Nazi scandal. But at least those scandals are still in the Nazi texting stage, and not yet the crucifying/beheading/dissecting stage.

But it didn’t end with the sense of shock and dismay at the Pentagon. Anthropic has been declared a supply-chain risk in response to company’s insistence on guardrails, with the implication that its AI technology will be blacklisted from the Pentagon’s growing AI ambitions. Anthropic has now taken the US government to court.

It’s important to note that Anthropic wasn’t imposing a hard rule that no actions could be taken in violation of its guardrails. But those exceptions would need to be be approved by Anthropic, through a phone call for example, which was an unacceptable obstacle according to Michael. This is a good time to recall how the CEO of Anthropic warned back in 2023 that, within two years, next-generation AI systems could enable large-scale bioterrorism unless appropriate guardrails are put in place. Concerns about the need for guardrails aren’t new. But also recall how how AIs demonstrated a disturbing capacity to conceive of blackmail schemes against their human operators in order to achieve their goals, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI being the most prone to blackmail among the 16 AI models tested, demonstrating an 86% rate of blackmail in the study when only faced with replacement and no conflict with the goal. And yet Claude Opus 4 isn’t the most worrying member of Antrhopic’s Claude suite of models. The ‘Claude Gov’ AIs built specifically for work with the military and classified government work was reportedly built without the guardrails found in the other Claude products, with the ability to “tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity.” So the cold feet Anthropic has been experiencing over its relationship with the Pentagon has apparently been shaped by its experiences developing the ‘Claude Gov’ models built without guardrails.

This is also a good time to recall how the incorporation of AI tech executives directly into the US military leadership. Silicon Valley tech executives were literally being embedded into the US military under the “Detachment 201” program. It’s something that will presumably be a major element of for how these kinds of AI capabilities are managed by the Pentagon.

It’s also worth keeping in mind how Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann was a featured guest for Manifest 2024, a conference ostensibly focused on prediction markets but, in reality, was a kind of ‘Who’s Who’ gathering of the transhumanist far right. Which is a reminder that we should probably be taking the ‘we don’t want to do evil’ narratives from Anthropic with a grain of salt. If Anthropic’s leadership truly is super dedicated to providing safe and responsible AIs, great. But let’s not pretend like corporate public relations stunts aren’t a reality. If Anthropic does ultimately lose out on major lucrative defense contracts that will be an indication they were acting from a sincere place. But that all remains to be seen.

Intriguingly, we’re told Palantir played a role in fomenting the Pentagon’s ire against Anthropic. It started following the capture of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, when an Anthropic executive reached out to Palantir to inquire whether or not Anthropic’s AIs had been used in the capture. The question apparently alarmed the Palantir executives so much they informed Emil Michael, creating the ‘holy cow’ moment for Michael. Keep in mind we aren’t even told that Anthropic demanded that its software not be used for such raids in the future. We’re just told that Anthropic asked Palantir whether or not its AIs had been used, and simply asking the question set off the waves of alarm at the Pentagon that resulted in this apparent impasse between Anthropic and the Pentagon about the possibility of any guardrails imposed at the corporate level at all.

In the mean time, xAi and OpenAI have apparently offered the Pentagon guardrail-free AIs going forward. Which makes this a good time to recall how xAIs big $200 million Pentagon contract last year came just a week after Grok declared itself MechaHitler. Which brings us to another rather alarming update: the head of robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI just announced her resignation, citing OpenAI’s agreement with the Pentagon to provide AIs that might engage in mass surveillance and autonomous lethality. Keep in mind that OpenAI has been assuring the public that its “red lines” preclude the domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. And yet, if that was really true, the head of robotics and consumer hardware probably wouldn’t have just resigned over those exact issues. Which is a reminder that the current debate over the possible military uses of military AIs includes both what should be done today but also years into the future. In other words, assurances that OpenAI’s technology isn’t currently being used dangerously really shouldn’t be seen as all that reassuring. A lot can change in the future. In fact, Emil Michael admitted that that part of the impasse with Anthropic is that he “can’t predict for the next 20 years what all the things we might use AI for.”

And that developing vision for how AI might be used in the future brings us to what is arguably the most disturbing set of Pentagon AI updates in recent days. Guess who was just hired to serve as chief data officer for the Pentagon in “a role that places him at the center of the Department’s most ambitious AI efforts”: Gavin Kliger. Yes, one of Elon Musk’s young fascist DOGE stooges got tapped to lead the Pentagon’s AI efforts. As we’ve seen, not only is Kliger an open fan of Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers, he even maintained a Substack account that includes posts like “The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies,” and “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.” As we’ll see, when Kliger was working at the (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) as part of his DOGE duties, the issue of conflicts of interest came up regarding his ownership of $365,000 in stocks in seven companies regulated by the CFPB. When the agency’s lawyers brought this conflict up with Kliger and told him this was prohibited for agency employees, he fired the lawyers. That’s the kind of person chose to play this leading role in the Pentagon’s AI efforts. What kind of damage Kilger ends up doing to the US at his new post at the Pentagon remains to be seen. But it’s hard to think of someone more dangerous to put in a position like this. So of course that’s who was chosen.

The future of military affairs is emerging. A future that will apparently include mass surveillance, autonomous weapons. All operating without any sort of moral guardrails. Especially since it’ll be fascists like Kliger overseeing them. It’s definitely a ‘holy cow’ moment:

Business Insider

Pentagon official details the ‘holy cow’ moments that sparked rift with Anthropic

By Brent D. Griffiths
Fri, March 6, 2026

* A top Pentagon official detailed how the Defense Department’s talks with Anthropic collapsed.
* On Thursday, the Pentagon said it had taken the unprecedented step of effectively blacklisting a US company.
* Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s R&D chief, said it was scary how much power Anthropic wielded.

The Pentagon’s R&D chief said the Department of Defense was “scared” about Anthropic shutting off access to its AI during a critical moment.

During an appearance on the “All-In Podcast” posted on Friday, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael detailed two pivotal moments that culminated in the Pentagon formally designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, effectively blacklisting one of the nation’s largest AI companies.

One of those instances, Michael said, was when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested that the impasse over how the Pentagon could deploy the AI startup’s models could be bridged with a phone call, even if it came during “a decisive moment.”

“I was giving these scenarios, these Golden Dome scenarios, and so on,” Michael said on “All-In Podcast,” describing President Donald Trump’s signature missile defense initiative.

“And he’s like, ‘Just call me if you need another exception.’ And I’m like, “But what if the balloon’s going up at that moment and it’s like a decisive action we have to take? I’m not going to call you to do something. It’s not rational.”

It’s not entirely clear what Anthropic would object to in the hypothetical Michael said he posed, though the implication is that some Golden Dome systems could have autonomous modes that fire weapons.

...

Elsewhere in the interview, Michael said that part of the impasse with Anthropic is that he “can’t predict for the next 20 years what all the things we might use AI for.”

Michael, who was previously a top executive at Uber, said the department’s concerns about Anthropic began to escalate after the US conducted a targeted raid on Venezuela to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The assault raised major questions about sovereignty, and congressional democrats questioned the decision not to seek approval for the deployment of US forces.

In the wake of the raid, Michael said that an unnamed Anthropic executive called a Palantir executive to ask whether Anthropic’s AI models had been used to carry it out. The Pentagon accesses Anthropic’s AI models through a government cloud that is operated by Amazon Web Services and then run by Palantir, Michael said. (On February 27, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI, though that directive came with a six-month phase-out period.)

Michael said Palantir officials were so alarmed by Anthropic’s questions that they alerted him.

“I’m like, ‘Holy sh it, what if this software went down, some guardrail kicked up, some refusal happened for the next fight like this one, and we left our people at risk,” Michael said, alluding to the US’s current war against Iran.

As talks grew heated, Michael said he felt like Anthropic turned the discussion “into a PR game” by publicly raising concerns about how the terms the Pentagon sought would not adequately account for potential misuse. Amodei has confirmed that Anthropic was particularly worried about the risks posed by fully autonomous weapons and how powerful AI models could be abused to spy on American citizens.

...

On Thursday, the Pentagon said it formally notified Anthropic that it was declaring the company and its products to be a supply chain risk, the first time in history that label had been applied to a US company.

...

Anthropic has suggested it will challenge the designation in court, especially since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said it prevents any defense contractor from doing business with Anthropic.

Asked about why the Pentagon went so far, Michael said the designation was not “punitive.”

“If their model has this policy bias, let’s call it, based on their constitution, their culture, their people, and so on,” he said. “I don’t want Lockheed Martin using their model to design weapons for me.”

Earlier this week, a Lockheed spokesperson said it would follow Trump and the Pentagon’s direction on whether it would continue to use Anthropic’s products. Michael also called out Boeing, describing how the airplane manufacturer could use Anthropic’s AI for non-defense tasks.

...

While Michael was critical of Anthropic, he praised xAI and Elon Musk for agreeing to the department’s terms, allowing it to deploy AI “for all lawful uses.”

Michael also praised OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for working with the Pentagon to quickly stand up another AI system capable of operating in classified settings, so the department can phase out Anthropic.

Altman and OpenAI have received significant blowback online for agreeing to work with the Pentagon. Altman publicly urged the department not to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.

“To his credit, I called him and said, ‘I need a solution if this thing goes sideways. I need multiple solutions. I’d like you to be one of them,” Michael said. “And he’s like, ‘Okay, well, what can I do for the country?’ I was like, ‘I need to get you up running as soon as I can.’ ”

————-

“Pentagon official details the ‘holy cow’ moments that sparked rift with Anthropic” By Brent D. Griffiths; Business Insider; 03/06/2026

“It’s not entirely clear what Anthropic would object to in the hypothetical Michael said he posed, though the implication is that some Golden Dome systems could have autonomous modes that fire weapons.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael wasn’t explicit about his desire to use Anthropic’s AIs for autonomous surveillance and lethality. But it was implied. That’s clearly where military affairs are heading. Perhaps not surprisingly, it appears the origin of the conflict between the Pentagon and Anthropic is rooted in a phone call made by an Anthropic executive to Palantir inquiringly whether or not Anthropic’s AI models had been used in the raid to capture Nicholas Maduro. Apparently simply asking the question alarmed Palantir officials so much that they alerted Emil Michael, setting off the chain of events that led up to the declaration of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk:

...
Michael, who was previously a top executive at Uber, said the department’s concerns about Anthropic began to escalate after the US conducted a targeted raid on Venezuela to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The assault raised major questions about sovereignty, and congressional democrats questioned the decision not to seek approval for the deployment of US forces.

In the wake of the raid, Michael said that an unnamed Anthropic executive called a Palantir executive to ask whether Anthropic’s AI models had been used to carry it out. The Pentagon accesses Anthropic’s AI models through a government cloud that is operated by Amazon Web Services and then run by Palantir, Michael said. (On February 27, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI, though that directive came with a six-month phase-out period.)

Michael said Palantir officials were so alarmed by Anthropic’s questions that they alerted him.

“I’m like, ‘Holy sh it, what if this software went down, some guardrail kicked up, some refusal happened for the next fight like this one, and we left our people at risk,” Michael said, alluding to the US’s current war against Iran.

As talks grew heated, Michael said he felt like Anthropic turned the discussion “into a PR game” by publicly raising concerns about how the terms the Pentagon sought would not adequately account for potential misuse. Amodei has confirmed that Anthropic was particularly worried about the risks posed by fully autonomous weapons and how powerful AI models could be abused to spy on American citizens.

...

On Thursday, the Pentagon said it formally notified Anthropic that it was declaring the company and its products to be a supply chain risk, the first time in history that label had been applied to a US company.

...

Anthropic has suggested it will challenge the designation in court, especially since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said it prevents any defense contractor from doing business with Anthropic.
...

Adding to the context of this apparent kerfuffle is the fact that xAI and OpenAI are both making it very clear that they are more than happy to comply with the Pentagon’s demands. Again, let’s not forget that xAI got a $200 million Pentagon contract came just a week after Grok’s ‘MechaHitler’ incident. Which is a reminder that ‘MechaHitler’ models probably don’t suffer from the kinds of moral constraints that the Pentagon is worry about having to deal with. Military-grade MechaHitler will be up for pretty much anything. The more violent and oppressive the better, but anything:

...
While Michael was critical of Anthropic, he praised xAI and Elon Musk for agreeing to the department’s terms, allowing it to deploy AI “for all lawful uses.”

Michael also praised OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for working with the Pentagon to quickly stand up another AI system capable of operating in classified settings, so the department can phase out Anthropic.
...

And that ongoing, very public, fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon brings us to an update that provides some important insight into that spat: the head of robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI just announced her resignation, citing concerns over OpenAI’s agreement to engage in what amounts to mass surveillance and lethal autonomy:

Reuters

OpenAI Robotics head resigns after deal with Pentagon

By Karen Brettell
March 7, 2026 2:37 PM CST
Updated

March 7 (Reuters) — Caitlin Kalinowski, head of robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, announced her resignation on Saturday, citing concerns about the company’s agreement with the Department of Defense.

In a social media post on X, Kalinowski wrote that OpenAI did not take enough time before agreeing to deploy its AI models on the Pentagon’s classified cloud networks.

“AI has an important role in national security,” Kalinowski posted. “But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”

Reuters could not immediately reach Kalinowski for comment, but she wrote on X that while she has “deep respect” for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the team, the company announced the Pentagon deal “without the guardrails defined,” she posted.

“It’s a governance concern first and foremost,” Kalinowski wrote in a subsequent X post. “These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed.”

OpenAI said the day after the deal was struck that it includes additional safeguards to protect its use cases. The company on Saturday reiterated that its “red lines” preclude use of its technology in domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.

“We recognize that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society and communities around the world,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.

...

————-

“OpenAI Robotics head resigns after deal with Pentagon” By Karen Brettell; Reuters; 03/07/2026

““AI has an important role in national security,” Kalinowski posted. “But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.””

We keep getting reassurances that things like surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy aren’t on the table. But if that was really the case, Caitlin Kalinowski, head of robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, probably wouldn’t have resigned cited precisely those concerns. And let’s not forget what Emil Michael said in that about report: a big part of his problem with Anthropic’s stance on the rules against abuses like mass surveillance and autonomous lethality being built into the companies’ products — even with the possibility of per-case exceptions being granted — is that he “can’t predict for the next 20 years what all the things we might use AI for.” Which is the kind of statement that reminds us it’s rather easy to predict both mass surveillance and autonomous lethality being requested by governments within the next 5 years let alone 20.

Or maybe now. Or really, probably now, given the kind the person just put in charge of the Pentagon’s AI effort: Gavin Kliger, one of Elon Musk’s fascist DOGE stooges who is clearly moving up in the world of Trump’s corrupt governmental Upside Down. He’s Pete Hegseth’s stooge now. The fascist stooge in charge of the Pentagon’s AI effort. It’s hard to imagine any conceivable way this 20-something DOGE kid is the best pick for the job. But he’s certainly not going to push back on any of Hegseth’s orders, especially on questions of ethics. The fact that Kliger’s Substack posts include entries like “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears” presumably helped in the recruitment process. And given the current ideological orientation of the Trump administration, the fact that Kliger had a history of retweeting nationalist Nick Fuentes and writing of being inspired by media criticism from a Holocaust denier probably didn’t hurt either. If anything they were signs of good character. The kind of good fascist character creating this new era of military AI technology:

The New Republic

Pentagon Hires DOGE Stooge to Run AI Efforts Amid Iran War

The Pentagon’s new chief data officer used to be a part of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Hafiz Rashid
March 6, 2026 1:46 p.m. ET

One of Elon Musk’s former DOGE minions has been tapped to run AI at the Pentagon.

In a post on X, the Department of Defense announced Friday that it was appointing Gavin Kliger, who worked at the Office of Personnel Management last year helping to purge the federal workforce, as chief data officer, “a role that places him at the center of the Department’s most ambitious AI efforts.”

“We are in a global competition for military AI dominance, and America must build on its leadership to extend our advantage over adversaries,” Kliger is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission is to integrate the unparalleled innovation of America’s private sector with the Department’s operational expertise to rapidly deliver advanced AI capabilities to our warfighters. By driving pace-setting projects with wartime urgency, we will ensure cutting-edge technology translates into decisive battlefield advantages for the United States.”

Kliger’s past with DOGE wasn’t pretty. He was assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help DOGE take over and dismantle the watchdog agency. Kliger happened to own up to $365,000 in stocks in seven companies that the CFPB regulated, including Tesla, Apple, Alphabet, Alibaba, and Berkshire Hathaway, as well as two cryptocurrencies. When CFPB’s lawyers told him this was prohibited for agency employees, he fired the lawyers.

Kliger also has a shady record on social media. Reuters reported last year that he has reposted content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and misogynist Andrew Tate, and expressed racist views as well as xenophobic views about immigrants. Now, he’ll be working with AI as the Pentagon continues Donald Trump’s reckless war with Iran.

...

But now, someone who had few—if any—ethical scruples over racism, bigotry, misogyny, or purging government employees will be at the center of AI efforts during a war. Kliger will probably be happy to assist in bombing Iran without regard to innocent lives.

————

“Pentagon Hires DOGE Stooge to Run AI Efforts Amid Iran War” by Hafiz Rashid; The New Republic; 03/06/2026

“Kliger also has a shady record on social media. Reuters reported last year that he has reposted content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and misogynist Andrew Tate, and expressed racist views as well as xenophobic views about immigrants. Now, he’ll be working with AI as the Pentagon continues Donald Trump’s reckless war with Iran.”

A young guy with a history of posting racist content was tapped for one of the most sensitive positions in the Pentagon, leading the US military’s AI efforts. What could possibly go wrong? And as we can see, Kliger’s response to being told by CFPB lawyers during his DOGE time there about a conflict of interest he was creating was to fire the lawyers. Again, what could possibly go wrong with this guy leading the Pentagon’s AI efforts?

...
Kliger’s past with DOGE wasn’t pretty. He was assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help DOGE take over and dismantle the watchdog agency. Kliger happened to own up to $365,000 in stocks in seven companies that the CFPB regulated, including Tesla, Apple, Alphabet, Alibaba, and Berkshire Hathaway, as well as two cryptocurrencies. When CFPB’s lawyers told him this was prohibited for agency employees, he fired the lawyers.
...

It’s pretty remarkable to see someone with Kliger’s demonstrable moral flaws installed in a position like this. Or at least it would be remarkable if the Pentagon wasn’t actively shopping for evil AIs ready and willing to do whatever. Which is also a reminder that AIs aren’t the only elements in the military with moral guardrails the current leadership might be potentially concerning.