The Horrible Rumors About Comet Ping Pong
The Horrible Rumors About Comet Ping Pong
Serving up a slice on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory & the 2016 murder of Seth Rich
The Pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016 alleged that high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta, were involved in a child-sex-trafficking ring operating out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. Proponents of the theory claimed that coded messages about illegal activities were hidden in emails leaked by WikiLeaks, which fact-checkers debunked—and, I have to add, I couldn’t find any results there either when I searched for the term “pizza arrangement”; however, one to Podesta from a late trustee of the Sandler Foundation about his lost handkerchief with “a map that seems pizza-related” apparently exists—while linking these claims to further conspiracy theories surrounding the 10 July 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich.
Because, believe it or not, there’s more than one conspiracy theorized here.
Hear That Long Whistle Blow
For those now unaware, Rich’s murder garnered significant attention at the time. Walking home in the early hours on 10 July 2016 in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Rich was killed in what appeared to be a botched robbery attempt during which he was shot in the back (twice) and after which his assailants took nothing. Despite being taken to the hospital, Rich succumbed to his injuries about an hour-and-a-half later.
In the aftermath of his murder, observers posited that Rich was the source of the DNC emails provided to WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election campaign, and that he was assassinated for leaking sensitive information revealing that the DNC conspired to prevent primary candidate Bernie Sanders from gaining the party’s nomination, leading to the resignation of then-chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Shulz two weeks after Rich’s murder.
The assassination hypothesis, it seems to me, hinges on two pieces of evidence:
WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s murder on 9 August 2016, the same day that Julian Assange (recently freed from British custody) said in an interview that “our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often [take] very significant risks” while referencing that same murder.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) delivered a memo to then-President Trump on 24 July 2017 arguing that forensic evidence suggests the data was copied onto an external storage device at a speed not possible via remote hacking—therefore leaked by someone with physical access to the DNC computer, not hacked remotely by Russians—while questioning the credibility of the intelligence assessment attributing the hack to Russia, suggesting it was agenda-driven and lacking in substantive evidence.
Among the members of VIPS who questioned the intelligent assessment stand Bill Binney and Larry Johnson, who together expanded on their memo in an article (reprinted by the LaRouche PAC) in February 2019. Suggesting that the NSA would have been able to trace a foreign hack if it had occurred, the pair criticize the investigators’ reliance on findings from private firms like CrowdStrike—the same one that distributed a software patch nine days ago which crashed an estimated 8.5 million devices—and air their suspicions the timing and actions of the DNC and cybersecurity companies following the alleged hack. They call for further scrutiny of the evidence and raise doubts about the validity of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian military personnel.
Interestingly, the aforementioned VIPS memo notes that CIA cyber tools like Vault 7 can be used for false-flag operations (as we’ve wagered might happen this year) to hint that “Guccifer 2.0”—the online persona that emerged in 2016 to communicate with journalists and provided documents purportedly obtained from hacking the DNC servers—may have been a front used by U.S. intelligence, since analysis of metadata from documents published by Guccifer 2.0 indicates that they were tampered with to falsely suggest Russian involvement.
Certainly that narrative runs counter to that endorsed by the D.C. establishment and mainstream media. As Yahoo News reported in July 2019, conspiracy theories alleging that Rich was murdered by a hit squad working for Hillary Clinton originated from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which circulated the narrative just days after Rich’s death.
The SVR’s 2016 report, says Yahoo, appeared on a website known for spreading Russian propaganda, and thereafter sparked a conspiracy theory that gained traction among conservative activists and in the White House while Russian state media and online agents amplified their psy-op over the first two-and-half years of the Trump Administration. The Hill added that now-former Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines (also remembered for declining to prosecute 67% of D.C. arrests) reported having obtained SVR intelligence reports on the case and briefed Mueller’s prosecutors on their contents before retiring in 2018.
Since I haven’t managed yet to track down the propaganda outlets where those reports appeared, or any archived versions thereof, I still wonder if Sines had the same kind of “evidence” that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) “had” in 2017 for demonstrating collusion between the Russian Federation and the 2016 Trump campaign—the kind, I mean, that didn’t make it into the Mueller Report (which determined no coordination occurred), and about which Rep. Schiff was censured in June 2023 for having lied. But maybe I’m paranoid.
For his part, Mueller set the U.S. establishment narrative in stone with his March 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 election—though neither the first nor second volume makes any mention of Sines’s alleged SVR propaganda, nor does the 2018 indictment of eleven Russian nationals alleged to have hacked the DNC and to have operated the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
In response, VIPS’s April 2019 memo asserted that Mueller presumed that Russia hacked DNC and Podesta emails without independent verification, while again criticizing his reliance on the firm CrowdStrike with its questionable credibility. They highlight discrepancies in the Mueller Report’s findings and offer again their own forensic investigation results. Noting that the narrative of Russian interference strained U.S.-Russia relations, the VIPS memo urges the President to challenge the flawed evidence and hints that renewed discussions between the Department of Justice (DoJ) and WikiLeaks’ Assange may present a potential opportunity to obtain exculpatory evidence. Their response concludes with a call for the President to address the issue head-on, despite expected resistance.
Of course, no independent verification was ever performed to demonstrate that the hacked DNC emails never appeared on Seth Rich’s personal or work laptops. Instead, U.S. law enforcement authorities treated Rich’s murder as a homicide, and pursued leads related to robbery and other potential motives, therefore finding no evidence to link his death to the DNC email leak. Rich’s parents settled a lawsuit with Fox News over claims linking his death to the Democratic Party, and to date the case remains unsolved, with no arrests made.
However, late last year a Texas judge ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to disclose information related to Rich’s murder that, in response to a 2017 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The FBI initially claimed no relevant files were found, but later admitted to possessing over 20,000 pages, including some related to Rich, and requested an additional 66 years to release the information. The court ordered the FBI to provide a timeline for disclosing information related to Rich’s laptops within 14 days and denied a motion for clarification was denied. Nonetheless, attorney Ty Clevenger reported in January 2024 that the FBI has continued defying that court order, leading some to renew calls to hold the bureau accountable.
Since it couldn’t locate its own files a year after Rich’s murder, we’re probably free to wonder how deeply they investigated it. But in the meantime, we’ve received the assurances of the aforementioned Mueller Report that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and provided the results to WikiLeaks as Guccifer 2.0, regardless of the fact that the FBI has thus far prevented anyone from independently verifying that Rich’s laptops were uninvolved.
…So! All’s well that ends well, right?
“In that case,” I can hear you asking, “why are we still talking about this?”
(Hopefully not just because Elon Musk brought it up five times in the week before the aforementioned judge issued the disclosure order.)
Remember That Tune?
The story’s just been on my mind: I’d heard of Pizzagate before, but not until this year did I learn that, in fact, pedophiles use “pizza” as a codeword when discussing child-sexual-abuse materials (CSAM) together online. Take a look at my username and the title of this newsletter, and then take a guess at why this concerned me so. Accordingly, in last season’s “The Hot & Fresh Pizza-Man: Year One”, I took a little time to disavow child trafficking (a big ask, I know, but somehow I managed it: thanks for your applause) and to distance myself from the association that my username has rendered inevitable.
Still, I guess now I’m putting even more time into it. For whatever reason, the story had staying power—after all, the first link in this dispatch’s first paragraph leads to a tweet from February of this year—and (at least for a fringe of the population) it had the potential to capture the imagination: including, of course, that of Edgar Maddison Welch, the gunman who plead guilty to a shooting incident at the aforementioned pizzeria in December 2016.
If you’d like more detail as to what all the fuss was about, I can point you to Titus Frost’s “#PizzaGate: The Completely Open Source Updated Investigation”, which the video’s description dates to 2016 and which I chanced upon via Twitter in February. In it, Frost discusses what evidence he and others find available for the existence of an elite pedophile ring involving high-level politicians and influential people, with previous examples of the same cited in the 1980s Franklin Community Federal Credit Union child-trafficking scandal (now remembered as a hoax, though some call that a faulty memory), in the UK’s 2012 Operation Yewtree investigation into Jimmy Savile (the late personal friend of now-King Charles) and other British media personalities, and, of course, in the infamous career of billionaire financier and child-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
(Radio Free Pizza devotees may recall that last month’s dispatch discussed both the Franklin scandal and Jeffrey Epstein as context for allegations of sexual assaults against Sean “Diddy” Combs. Investigative journalist Nick Bryant, known for exposing such networks, suggests that Combs’s situation might reflect a broader, systemic issue within elite circles, where sexual misconduct is used for blackmail and control, mirroring the cases of Epstein and others.)
With regard to Pizzagate in particular, Frost examines the connections between Comet Ping Pong’s owner James Alefantis, the aforementioned Podesta and his brother Tony, and Clinton herself. The alleged evidence that Frost presents includes suspicious artwork belonging to Tony Podesta, codewords related to pedophilia in the Podesta brothers’ emails about the pizzeria, and Alefantis’ disturbing Instagram posts containing further pedophilia references. Frost argues that the purported connections of Alefantis and his partner David Brock (founder of Media Matters) to figures like Barack Obama and George Soros—as demonstrated (at ~23:19–24:02) in tax returns from American Bridge 21st Century (the super PAC founded by Brock in 2010 and to which George Soros was the largest donor in 2016) showing $11,000 paid to Comet Ping Pong in 2014—make him highly suspect. Furthermore, he suggests that tunnels may connect Comet Ping Pong to nearby locations like buildings housing an OTO Masonic Lodge and a Supreme Council of Freemasons.
Naturally, Frost calls for law enforcement and public investigations, and advocates for continued research, information sharing, business reviews, and “truth bombing” to force authorities to act. Given that Frost continues sharing this information nigh eight years after his documentary’s online debut, we might say that those “truth bombs” continue resounding—or otherwise, that they didn’t explode loudly enough.
Tough to say which, but I presume that either the perceived quiet surrounding allegations of politicians involved with pedophilia, or the perceived deafness of the population to those allegations, must somehow factor in to the ongoing interest of Frost and others. In contrast however, WNYC Studios’ On the Media suggested in 2016 that the debunked theory persisted due to a mix of confirmation bias and distrust of established institutions, and links it to to historical moral panics like the Satanic Panic daycare hysteria of the 1980s (as Richard Beck proposes at ~7:38). In addition, the hosts and guests blame our modern habits of media consumption, with like-minded communities furnishing echo chambers for alternative viewpoints, with the contemporary American climate of distrust and animosity down partisan lines encourages the use of conspiracy theories to smear opponents.
Understanding these psychological and sociological factors, they tell us, is crucial for addressing the spread of conspiracy theories and promoting critical thinking and media literacy. Pizzagate, therefore, serves as a stark reminder of how, in the digital age, the swift proliferation of unverified information can have real-world consequences. (For another example, we might even cite include the injuries that befell Jack Burkman, a D.C. lobbyist known for publicity-seeking antics who launched a campaign to investigate Rich’s murder that involved filming a reenactment of the shooting, which culminated in Burkman being shot himself.)
…In that case, would you say I’m a public menace for writing about it now?
Sirens on the Thoroughfare
Of course, no victims or family thereof have ever leveled an accusation, no investigation has ever been conducted, and no charges have ever been filed—at least as far as I can tell. With that in mind, it looks like the most grievous harm of Pizzagate arose not from any child-sex-trafficking, but from stubborn attempts of the delusional to uncover it.
So, maybe people on the internet should exercise a little more discretion with their paranoid apophenia! That’s how rumors get started. (Like similar ones from earlier this year about the illegal Chabad-Lubavitch tunnel in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, where video seemed to show a stained mattress and photos seemed to show a baby rocker.) Here, I speak from a position of some experience: on a much smaller scale, of course, but nonetheless, discovering the flier in the photo below posted last autumn at a bus stop only a block from my apartment caused me considerable dismay.
“In 2021, A_______ _______ _______ sold me to John and his son Zach,” the flier begins, and trust me, gets worse from there. I’ve censored all the identifying information to prevent anyone from styling themselves vigilantes over these unproven allegations of the aforementioned John having raped and murdered a child on the property next door to that where A_______ lived, with one of these neighboring residents (who wears a cap of a color curiously redacted before I saw the flier myself) helping John to dispose of the child’s body. Residents of that next-door house “prey on immigrants, runaways, unhoused peoples, [and] addicts” in careers that seem to include multiple murders, rapes, and instances of child-trafficking spanning “all ages and genders”; in particular, C________ “pretends to be an ally and Catholic to gain undocumented immigrants trust then exploits them” while making sure to “‘keep them in line’ by threatening the immigrants with ICE,” such the maid whom the Zach named in this flier reportedly raped. (Another offense of John’s was also redacted before I got to it, though it doesn’t save his reputation.)
Fortunately, it’s easy enough to prove that I’m not the same “Zach” named above: “John” isn’t my father’s name. Nonetheless, I’ve done my best to prevent anyone reading this from pursuing vigilante justice, and I hope the police follow through on investigating my report to them about it—and the same, for that matter, in regard to the municipal advisory council mentioned, which has also been informed.
While I hesitate to pass my own judgment, and I would prefer that none except a court of a law try to do so, I see other causes for concern besides clearing my own name. Among those concerns, I find particular alarm (“particular” for the purposes of this dispatch) with the predatory exploitation of illegal immigrants described in the flier: that aligns too well, you see, with what I’ve learned recently from Amber Yang of WantToKnow.info about the U.S. border crisis and its relationship to missing and abused children—as well as to controversial tracking technologies and instability in Central American countries.
Here, Yang (who appeared on our Better Futures miniseries in its final episode last season) discusses issues around the influx of migrants, and the lack of transparency and accountability. While she acknowledges the U.S. immigration crisis as a polarizing issue—with millions of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border yearly based on Customs data (including recent reports of 300,000 migrants flown into the U.S. secretly), increasing budget pressures on cities and amplifying questions around use of taxpayer funds—Yang maintains that solutions lie in open-minded discussion across differences and investigating issues around children’s safety, human rights, privacy, and support for local governments.
Highlighting the 150,000+ unaccompanied children who arrived in 2022, the thousands who disappear yearly with no clear accountability, and the whistleblowers like Tara Lea Rodas and Aaron Stevenson, who exposed how the children of migrants being delivered to criminal sponsors involved in trafficking, Yang also notes how controversial technologies like facial recognition and experimental AI are being used to track migrants as they pass through ICE facilities that whistleblowers accuse of trafficking children to criminal sponsors, and which have faced sexual abuse allegations, and child housing facilities, which currently face abuse lawsuits. She appropriately traces the root causes of the immigration crisis to U.S. foreign interventions backing extremists, destabilization efforts, civil wars, resulting in the economic devastation in Central American countries from which migrants are now fleeing. Accordingly, Yang calls for constructive discussion and action on providing real government oversight for child safety, for addressing root causes of migration—i.e., the destabilizing effects of U.S. foreign policy—and for developing a compassionate humanitarian approach to border security.
(“…Hold on now: what are these whistleblowers talking about?”)
Variations on a Theme
Despite what mainstream coverage of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory might imply, concerns regarding the involvement of state intelligence services in child trafficking are neither novel nor baseless. Not just since 2016, but throughout the modern era, there have been persistent allegations and documented cases suggesting collusion between intelligence agencies and human-trafficking networks, stemming from various instances where state actors have been implicated in facilitating or turning a blind eye to child-trafficking.
For example, James Corbett (admired for a long time around here) touched on it early in his career with 2008’s “Who Is Jeff Gannon?” covering the mysterious case of Jeff Gannon, a conservative reporter who received White House press credentials despite his background as “James Guckert” on gay escort websites. Beyond that—and more useful for our purposes here—the episode discusses (at ~30:31–34:22) the missing child Johnny Gosch, whose mother reported that he’d returned home to reveal that he’d been kidnapped and trafficked, implying (of course) that Gannon might be Gosch’s adult identity.
That doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched—as Gosch’s own mother might agree; anyway, she calls it (at ~35:54–36:04) “not impossible”—after you learn (at ~45:36–46:31) of past White House scandals in 1989 involving Craig Spence and Lawrence King using underage callboys. Even more interestingly (at least for our purposes here), Corbett provides further details (at ~49:54–51:59) about how, at the time the Callboy Ring Affair arose, the scandal over the same Franklin Community Federal Credit Union child sex case of 1988 described above was then coming to a head in Omaha:
A black Republican who had been a leader in organizing minority support for the president’s 1988 campaign […] was at the center of a sex and money scandal that […] originated with the collapse of the minority-oriented Franklin Community Credit Union in Omaha, directed by Lawrence E. King, Jr. […] In November 1988, King’s offices were raided by the FBI, and $40 million was discovered missing. Within weeks, the Nebraska State, which initially opened the inquiry to find out where the money had gone, instead found [itself] questioning young adults and teenagers who said that they had been child prostitutes. Social workers and state child care administrators accused King of running a child prostitution ring […] The Weekly stated that Roy Stevens, a private investigator who has worked on the case and heads the Missing Youth Foundation, says there is reason to believe that the CIA is directly implicated, and that the FBI refuses to help in the investigation and has sabotaged any efforts to get to the bottom of the story. Stevens says that Paul Bonacci directly accused President Bush […] when he testified before the Franklin Committee. Bonacci, who had been one of the child prostitutes, is identified by leading child abuse experts as a well-informed, credible witness.
That same Bonacci reported having been a victim in the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union scandal, and (in the unaired 1993 Discovery Channel documentary The Conspiracy of Silence, clipped at ~54:45–59:36) to having helped his abusers recruit further victims—who he said, Corbett tells us (at ~1:00:10–1:00:54), had included the kidnapped Gosch.
(As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Stevens’ suspicions about CIA involvement in the scandal in light of the findings of journalist Derrick Broze of The Conscious Resistance Network—to whose work we’ll return again below—in his 2019 documentary Who Will Find What the Finders Hide? investigating a 1987 incident involving two members of the Finders cult arrested in Florida with six malnourished children whom they claimed to be taking to a school in Mexico, leading to allegations of satanic rituals and child trafficking. As Broze reports [at ~14:13–19:32], U.S. Customs Agent Raymond J. Martinez found his own inquiries stymied, eventually being told that “‘the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter.’”)
Though, like I said above, the Franklin scandal—also known as the Boys Town scandal for the troubled-youth-charity’s involvement—is remembered today as having been debunked, those interested in learning more about the allegations involved can turn to Corbett’s 2015 “Political Pedophilia” (at ~34:27–39:42) analyzing why pedophilia seems prevalent among political elites, and how their kakistocracy (“rule by the worst”) maintains itself via systemic child abuse. Further details include:
Paul Bonacci, one of the victims, claims that he and others were flown to Bohemian Grove to participate in orgies and other acts of child abuse. In July 1990, then-Chief Investigator Gary Caradori and his son were killed in a mysterious plane crash, and in 1999, John DeCamp represented Bonacci in a lawsuit filed against Lawrence E. King. Bonacci won a million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages to be paid by King, who has only served jail time for bank fraud. And this goes into a lot of other stories, including The Washington Times’s “Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush” and other such headlines that come sometimes and go very quickly—perhaps obviously and predictably so.
…Wait a minute: if the Franklin scandal was debunked, then shouldn’t Bonacci have been paying damages to King? What a country!
Other subjects cover in this later episode include the same examples provided in the Pizzagate documentary described above: namely, Jimmy Savile and Jeffrey Epstein. Of the former, Corbett recounts (at ~3:15–8:51) how justice and polite society turned a blind eye to “the BBC fixture who for decades presented top of the pops as well as the popular children’s program Jim’ll Fix It […] who for half a century serially abused, raped, sexually preyed upon children”, and describes the insights gained from research into such a distasteful topic:
The Jimmy Savile case is particularly instructive […] because it really does encapsulate this phenomenon in a nutshell. Here we have this man who, as we now know, was widely known amongst media and political circles to be a pedophile, to be a sexual predator, a rapist, a serial abuser of children, and yet that open secret was kept from the public […] and suddenly, when he died, the floodgates were opened. This is interesting because it provides an insight into […] how this phenomenon is perpetuated, how it operates, how political connections and media influence can keep the lid on a scandal as massive as this one.
To that end, Corbett details Savile’s extensive network of connections and highlights how his relationships with wealthy and powerful individuals in the entertainment industry, his employers at the BBC, and political figures and even members of the British royal family—including then-Prince Charles—while his horrific abuses were still ongoing.
These relationships, we presume, account for the failure of those in power to hold him accountable. However, Corbett offers a complementary and expanded explanation while elucidating the concept of a kakistocracy, citing (at ~41:04–44:24) a comment from Dr. Tjeerd Andringa (also a guest on Corbett’s program), he explains that the elite may use child abuse to maintain control by creating a cycle of abuse that produces obedient and servile individuals who lack autonomy. This perpetuates a system in which psychopaths are recruited and groomed for positions of power through stages of initiation that reveal their ruthlessness and loyalty (say, by recruiting their fellow victims, as Bonacci claimed to have done), while giving their psychopathic abusers the opportunity to collect material for later blackmail to ensure their compliance within this corrupt system.
In retrospect, collecting such compromising materials sounds a lot like Jeffrey Epstein’s operation. Reporting in 2015, Corbett describes (at ~20:20–28:41) the connections between the former financier and convicted sex offender and various high-profile individuals, including Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, among the many others in politics and entertainment named in a stolen black book containing contact details of individuals associated with Epstein. The then-ongoing scandal surrounded Epstein’s involvement in child-sex-trafficking, as well as the legal proceedings related to his plea deal and allegations against prominent figures like Prince Andrew.
The aforementioned Derrick Broze offered his own treatment of the Epstein scandal in his 2018 documentary Bringing Down Jeffrey Epstein, detailing the billionaire’s lenient plea deal after his conviction for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. Though over forty women accused Epstein of molesting them as minors during massages at his Palm Beach home, with some victims saying they were rented to politicians and businessmen—perhaps including known associates like American presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, with one victim (as Broze details at ~18:07–18:39) accusing the latter by name before abruptly withdrawing her lawsuit—a controversial non-prosecution agreement negotiated with federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta (the Trump Administration’s Labor Secretary, at the time of Broze’s report), under which Epstein plead guilty to a lesser charge and served thirteen months in jail with work release, avoiding more serious charges or a tougher sentence.
Of course, Broze questions whether Epstein’s wealth and connections enabled him to evade harsher punishment for his alleged crimes. In addition he speculates (at ~24:22–24:28) that “if the allegations are true—that Epstein secretly recorded these sex parties—he may have plenty of dirt on many of the world’s most powerful people.”
I’d say that’s putting it mildly! (Though I don’t know yet how I’d put it with appropriate gravitas.) Certainly, it would have concerned those people a great deal what federal authorities could have uncovered after arresting Epstein again on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, one year after the release of Broze’s documentary, leading to the resignation of the aforementioned Secretary Acosta. Surely too those parties would have breathed sighs of relief later that year, after Epstein was “found dead” in his cell of an apparent hanging, with surveillance footage recording his cell door on the night of his death deleted in a “clerical error”—because, of course: everyone knows, that happens all the time.
But with the benefit of not just one more year, but six, I think it’s possible Broze might now conclude that collecting dirt on the world’s most powerful people had been Epstein’s true purpose. If you’re not sure yet why I’d say so, we can turn back to The Corbett Report, on which the aforementioned veteran host interviewed Whitney Webb—herself much admired around here, along with her outlet Unlimited Hangout—in 2022 about her two-volume triumph, One Nation Under Blackmail, which investigates Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to intelligence agencies, organized crime, sexual blackmail operations, and networks of power elites, and in the process demonstrates that his crimes go far beyond child- or sex-trafficking.
Tracing the historical origins of Epstein’s powerful network—which intertwined figures like Leslie Wexner, Robert Maxwell, Nathan Myhrvold, and Adnan Khashoggi (who, Webb tells us [at ~9:37–9:46], had “a group of women […] used as sexual bait […] for the purpose of sex blackmail”), as well as prominent families like the Rockefellers and Kennedys, in addition to major institutions like Harvard University, Microsoft, Israeli intelligence, and the Clinton White House—Webb identifies its roots in a symbiosis between intelligence agencies and organized crime, employing sexual blackmail to compromise leaders in politics and business. This, she tells us (at ~53:53–55:26), represents a demonstrable continuity, dating at least to the 1940s, in how intelligence agencies and organized crime work together, using sexual blackmail and illicit financing to control governments.
Interestingly, for its potential parallels with the model of kakistocracy described above, Webb describes (at ~3048–32:59) two tiers of sex trafficking by Epstein, one exploiting vulnerable girls, and another cultivating elite wives/girlfriends to compromise powerful figures across business, politics and academia:
[To explain] the damning aspects of the Trump-Epstein relationship […] I’d have to explain what I think was going on with the sex-trafficking stuff with Epstein […] there were probably two parallel operations that were going on: one is […] exploited girls and the massages […] but there’s another tier of girls who are lured in the same way […] but they actually receive that help and then are cultivated […] and they become the wives and girlfriends of the elite in this social circle. And when it comes to Trump, one of the women that Epstein was cultivating […] was a Norwegian heiress named Selena Middlefart who actually accompanied Epstein on one of his visits to the Clinton White House […] and she became Donald Trump’s girlfriend in this period […] then the subsequent girlfriend Trump had after Middlefart is his current wife, Melania, who allegedly was introduced to Trump also by Maxwell and Epstein […] There’s other cases besides Trump of these women, including many of the women that accompanied Epstein to the Clinton White House of sort of getting involved with people in Epstein’s social circle that were very wealthy […] He’s accompanied by attractive young women and a lot of those women after time end up becoming girlfriends or wives of people much older and wealthier and powerful than than they are [with] telling connections to Epstein’s network.
Taken all together, Webb’s investigation into Epstein’s network reveals a disturbing pattern of sexual blackmail used to control leaders in politics and business. Clearly, exploring cases like Epstein’s means charting the deep-seated connections between power, corruption, and exploitation, underscoring the insidious nature of such crimes and the urgent need for systemic change.
Likewise for Savile’s case, and even (some of might say) for the Franklin scandal, on which mainstream coverage touched again in 2022 through a review of the unaired Conspiracy of Silence documentary. While other outlets remember the scandal as debunked, as noted above, let’s not forget that the associated Callboy Ring Affair (a story broken by The Washington Times in 1989) received serious enough attention for “intelligence experts” of the time to hypothesize in The Australian Financial Review that it might have been a KGB operation.
That brings us back to Seth Rich. His murder in 2016 and the suspicious circumstances of his death saw some theorize (justifiably, given Julian Assange’s comments at the time) that Rich had leaked proof of corruption in the Democratic National Committee. Throughout subsequent months and years, the intelligence and criminal justice apparatuses of the U.S. establishment would spin a counter-narrative alleging Russian espionage in the interest of interfering with the 2016 presidential election—rather ironically, since the leaked documents indicate the DNC’s interference with the will of its own voters. In contrast, veteran intelligence professionals including Bill Binney and Larry Johnson critiqued the establishment story and the corroborating documentation, noting that it bore evidence of tampering in its metadata that could have been accomplished with programs that U.S. intelligence is now known to have possessed (once again, ironically) due to revelations from WikiLeaks.
I suppose then that someone could easily theorize that Russian agents killed Rich in an effort to pin the murder on Hillary Clinton—or, for that matter, that Western intelligence services could have cultivated the Pizzagate conspiracy theory themselves in an effort to discredit the entirety of the DNC leaks. That, at least, might help to explain how so little as a single email from John Podesta referring to “pizza” could lead to a gunman visiting a pizzeria: especially when one compares it to historic examples (documented, admittedly, to varying degrees) linking child-sex-trafficking and other activities of organized crime to political operatives and intelligence agencies, as outlined above.
Of course, the recent court order compelling the FBI to disclose information related to Rich’s murder complicates the case further, raising questions about transparency, accountability, and the role of law enforcement agencies in addressing unresolved mysteries with potential political implications. One would imagine, however, that the FBI wouldn’t have resisted the courts so obstinately, if they indeed maintain that Rich didn’t leak the DNC emails. Meanwhile, as inquiries into Rich’s murder continue, it remains to be seen whether clarity and closure will ever be achieved in this deeply contentious and enigmatic case.
Certainly conspiracy theories arise and persist due in part or whole to a learned distrust of establishment institutions, sometimes provoked in certain fringe circles to delusion through the social proof supplied in online echo chambers of like-minded outsiders: the kind of people you might say I take for my subjects as an “outsider analyst,” or otherwise, those whom you might say I represent. In the case of Pizzagate, its theorists seized on the appearance of what some have used as a codeword in a political campaign manager’s correspondence, interpreted its appearance there to indicate his involvement in a scandal reminiscent of those from years past, and—through ongoing rounds of weighing bare and typically unverifiable evidence against their confirmation bias, and likely (so long as state intelligence remained uninvolved) nothing more nor less—decided that child-sex-trafficking and/or ritual sexual abuse must occur in the basement of D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong.
But I think it’s a shame to consider that such a conspiracy theory should compete in the popular imagination with any narrative linking Rich’s death to the DNC email leaks, given the flaws in the evidence for the official explanation outlined in the VIPS memos, as described above. Certainly the persistence of some conspiracy theories underscores the need for critical thinking and media literacy to combat the spread of unverified information and to prevent real-world consequences from arising—and perhaps we should regard as least trustworthy those that surround recent news, erring on the side of caution and, if we just can’t help but indulge a paranoid tendency, assuming that these theories represent only the ongoing operations of information warfare, at least until they’re supported with independent, evidence-based inquiry. Lacking that, taking any kind of action based on those theories we might encounter—as James Corbett reminds us in “Political Pedophilia” (at ~55:00–1:05:56), featured above, highlighting cases like bizarre claims of a McDonald’s in Hampstead, England serving butchered children to customers—will most likely amount to nothing more than conducting a with hunt.
The same concerns informed my cautious censoring of the alarming flier posted last year at a bus stop in my neighborhood. Analysts (such as myself) who wish to present and account for the events of our shared world must, I believe, meet the prerequisite responsibility of entertaining—without such bias that their conclusions always arise prejudiced—the merits of whatever evidence they might find raised to support a claim. That applies even to claims as outlandish as those that comprise the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Still, much as it piques my interest to note, for example, that the flier claims one of those named used the pretense of Catholic faith while victimizing immigrants, and that the Boys Town charity implicated in the Franklin scandal (as the aforementioned Corbett notes in “Who Is Jeff Gannon?” at ~55:30–59:53) has been implicated in numerous other child-sex-abuse scandals over the years, I believe that if I blindly believed the unverified contents of that flier, then I might have easily become a cautionary tale myself, with potentially serious consequences for individuals and communities alike.
I hope that goes some way toward demonstrating how the complexities of modern information landscapes demand that media consumers recognize the importance of rigorous investigation, independent verification, and critical thinking to distinguish between fact and fiction. However, I believe that whatever blade we use to divide the two must also cut both ways: stories shouldn’t be forgotten if they implicate our institutions, and that crimes shouldn’t be excused when the rich and powerful are committing them—and our society’s news outlets shouldn’t obfuscate them (or assist state intelligence in doing so) to accomplish either such task.
Though the proliferation of rumors and conspiracy theories on the internet underscores the need for critical thinking and discernment to ensure that unfounded claims do not overshadow genuine issues or obscure the truth, allegations that may often be met with skepticism or dismissed as conspiracy theories, but which nonetheless come with numerous whistleblower testimonies, investigative reports, and historical evidence, shouldn’t be discounted just because they (for example) sound like something from Pizzagate.
(Of course, even the morning of this dispatch’s release, I’m still checking WikiLeaks: searching the exact phrase “pizza” returns 160 entries from the Clinton, Podesta, and DNC email archives. Nothing much here, as far as I can tell—besides a 2008 email to Podesta with the subject-line “Comet on Pizza” with an address that also suggests it might be from the aforementioned Alefantis, but which says nothing in it about child-trafficking.)
Avoiding that dismissive impulse, I believe, will assist us to better navigate the discourse surrounding contentious issues with far-reaching consequences. Maybe, in fact, that would even help inspire broad recognition of the need for vigilant oversight and accountability mechanisms within intelligence agencies to prevent them from concealing (let alone supervising) abuses like those from which Epstein profited.
In the face of these challenges, it’s imperative for individuals and communities to remain vigilant, question narratives, and advocate for accountability and justice. Only through collective efforts to address root causes and hold perpetrators accountable can we hope to create a more just and equitable society for all.