Epstein and Maxwell accused sex traffickers, Trump: ‘Hitler did a lot of good things’
- Jeffrey Epstein ‘A story of power’: podcast on Epstein and Maxwell to draw on hours of interviews
- New books on Trump offer behind-the-scenes looks at presidency
Jeffrey Epstein
‘A story of power’: podcast on Epstein and Maxwell to draw on hours of interviews
Edward Helmore Sun 11 Jul 2021
Vicky Ward’s 13-part series will focus on a manipulative con artist and the men involved with him
The disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein has been dead almost two years and his consort Ghislaine Maxwell is firmly behind bars awaiting trial, but the world’s obsession with the pair of accused high society sex traffickers who allegedly preyed on young girls continues unabated.
The latest addition to the canon of lore on Epstein, Maxwell and rich and powerful social circles they moved in comes from the veteran British journalist Vicky Ward, who is launching a 13-part podcast based on hours of unpublished interviews with Epstein.
Ward’s podcast revisits transcripts and sources that formed her 2003 Vanity Fair story, The Talented Mr Epstein, and will probably raise many new questions – though perhaps answer fewer – centering on the international reach of the epic scandal of Epstein and his former girlfriend Maxwell, whose trial begins later this year on co-conspirator charges....
The podcast, Chasing Ghislaine, created by Ward and executive-produced by James Patterson, also comes as a fund set up to resolve sexual abuse claims against Epstein and his estate has paid out a total of $67m to settle some of the 175 claims received before submissions closed in March this year.
Ward has been at this game for a long time. While working on the original Vanity Fair story on Epstein, she described being exposed to threats, including a severed cat’s head and a bullet found on the grounds of the magazine’s editor’s home.
Her new series, she says, is focused on Epstein and the men involved with him.,..,
Still, if the Epstein scandal was as simple as his cover story of a tax adviser running a 77th St party house in upper Manhattan for wealthy, connected men, it could hardly have claimed the reputations of people like Leon Black, Les Wexner, Glenn Dubin and Joi Ito – all stepping down from their posts, Ward says.
“You wouldn’t have Ehud Barak issuing hot denials and Bill Clinton basically silenced, or the breakup of Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, and Ghislaine Maxwell sitting in jail. Epstein’s genius was getting people to trust him and then buying their silence. He called it playing the box. That’s not your average banker, and he often bragged about how much dirt he had on people,” she said.
But the legal traffic in the Epstein-Maxwell affair is not entirely a one-way street.
Last month, the former British socialite won a court victory when a judge ordered one of her accusers to pay her $13.70 to cover litigation expenses. That came before a third documents dump, anticipated to come next week, that arises from defamation suit brought against Maxwell by one of her accusers, Virginia Roberts Guiffre....
“What gets lost amid the horrific sexual crime allegations is that he was the most brilliant con-artist of all time. He was an international thief, and a thief for much longer than police allege he was a sexual predator, with an amazing three-prong strategy of charm, control, con,” she said.
“He told me in 2002 that the thing about rich people is when they have money stolen, they don’t want to go to the authorities. They just want it back. The number of people and institutions and people he fleeced is more than anyone knows.”
New books on Trump offer behind-the-scenes looks at presidency
Yahoo News DYLAN STABLEFORD July 13, 2021....
‘Hitler did a lot of good things’
Bender’s new book — “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” out Tuesday — details a trip to Europe to commemorate the end of World War I during which Trump reportedly told his chief of staff, John Kelly, “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.” At the time Kelly was giving Trump an impromptu history lesson.
According to Bender, Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred,” emphasizing German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s. Per Bender, Kelly “pushed back again and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”
Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for the former president, refuted the Hitler claim, telling the Guardian, “This is totally false. President Trump never said this....
But Bender’s book makes a bigger point.
“Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow, or the Black experience in general post-Civil War as vague to non-existent,” Bender writes. “But Trump’s indifference to Black history was similar to his disregard for the history of any race, religion, or creed.”
Throughout his time in office, Trump was slow to condemn right-wing militias, many of which contained neo-Nazi sympathies or elements of white supremacy.
President Biden cited Trump’s response to the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in the death of a counterprotester, as one of the reasons he decided to run in 2020, and he called on Trump to condemn white supremacy during a presidential debate, which Trump declined to do....
Then, as swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan were too close to call, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani instructed Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff; Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien; and Miller to declare Trump the winner anyway.
“‘Just say we won,’ Giuliani told them. ‘Just say we won Pennsylvania,’ Giuliani said,” according to Leonnig and Rucker’s account. “Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible. ‘We can’t do that,’ Meadows said, raising his voice. ‘We can’t.’"....
