Epstein Files Expert Exposes Les Wexner & Epstein Ties | Mike Benz

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They're both a huge, huge help.

Thank you.

Ben's back again.

Great to see you, man.

Good to see you as well.

There's been a lot going on since the last time you were here, literally like eight

weeks ago.

Yeah, and the world has moved fast.

Yeah, I see a lot of videos coming from you, long live streams as well, breaking down

some of these things.

It was ironic that we ended the last podcast with you talking about Elon and Trump.

And then like three days later, it was like D day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we'll get there on that.

But you've been tweeting out a lot of things, obviously related to this Epstein stuff.

So we'll go through all your findings there as well as some good old-fashioned USAID stuff

today.

But one of the things you keep pointing out is like everything comes back to a Rand

Contra.

Everything comes back to a Rand Contra.

So we throw around this term around...

We throw it around online all the time, a Rand Contra.

A lot of people out there obviously know the basics of what it is.

But what I would love to start off with today is a full history of like, here's the documentary,

here's what happened with the Rand Contra, and then we'll paint back everything that you're

painting back to it.

Yeah.

The reason I always come back to Iran Contra, even for things that happened before, you

know, like Tulsi just dropped this 230,000 documents around the Martin Luther King in assassination,

which was in 1968.

Iran Contra wasn't from until 1981 to 1988.

But the reason I always come back to Iran Contra and why I think that everybody should really

do a study of it is because it's the way to understand how intelligence work got structured

after the first set of real reforms to the CIA.

And we've been living in the shadow of the structure of Iran Contra ever since.

So you had the CIA get born in 1947 under the National Security Act.

And from 1947 until 1975, it had a free ride.

It could do pretty much anything.

There was no real oversight.

There was no Senate Select Committee.

There was no Senate Intelligence Committee.

There was no House Intelligence Committee.

You didn't need to get written sign off to do a covert action through a presidential finding.

It could get away with literal murder.

I mean, it could literally go and assassinate people with a heart attack on.

If you go back and go to YouTube and put on the Frank Church holding up the heart attack

gun with James Jesus Angleton and Colby the CIA director, I mean, they could literally

get away with murder.

And they were also very sloppy during this period.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, the traditional way that the CIA would move would be through

the creation of what they called CIA proprietaries, which was when the CIA both funded an organization

and then directed or controlled it.

And what happened in the mid 1970s in the run up to the Jimmy Carter administration, things

came to a head because the CIA had been messing around so much with the anti-war side of

the Democrat Party, which was becoming more and more ascended during the Vietnam War,

which was basically 55 to 75.

As that war is getting more and more scandalized and there's more and more heat on the CIA,

these come to a head with these church and pipe committees in Congress, which turn up

all the dirt on the CIA.

That's when Operation Mockingbird gets exposed to about CIA in the media.

That's when Operation Chaos gets exposed about the CIA infiltrating student groups on college

campuses.

That's when MK Ultra gets exposed with CIA and messing around with mind control and behavioral

influence.

That's when really everybody in society begins looking at their own institutional ties to

this cloaked anger spy agency, the universities, the unions, the, I mean, all the way down

to the teachers unions, the CIA was paying the National Education Association a million

bucks to tilt their policy and whatnot.

These institutions are still around today.

But what happened beginning in 75, 76 and then when Carter gets elected in 76 is their

handcuffs put on direct CIA activity and so everything would require a presidential

finding for every covert action.

So the president had to approve of it and that also meant that the president was therefore

responsible.

The whole plausible deniability cloak that the CIA had since 1948 began to get very messy

when you had to have written sign off for all the activity.

And the fact that there was now so much oversight of it made it hard to be plausible to keep

plausible deniability.

And so the CIA had to change the way it moved in order to maintain plausible deniability

and it moved into the NGO layer and into the outside financier layer from the 70s into

the early 80s.

And Jimmy Carter became president.

A lot of people think back of Jimmy Carter, especially in the Republican spaces like the

weakest president of the modern times, he completely decimated the CIA's traditional

capabilities.

He did something called the Halloween massacre, which fired 30% of the entire operations

division of the CIA in a single day, crippled their budget, swore off all different categories

of covert action.

And it was also during this period that the U.S. lost control of Iran.

In 1979, there was the Iranian Revolution, of course there was the Iran hostage situation

which sort of gave rise to Ronald Reagan, winning in 1980.

And so you had these Democrats, it's funny how this is sort of flipped in the modern era

because you have now much more anti-war voices on the GOP side than on the DNC side.

But in the early 1980s, you still the Democrats in control of Congress, but you had this Republican

president.

And they wanted to do certain types of foreign policy that the Democrats disagreed with.

In particular, there was getting to Iran Contra now.

In Iran Contra, you had two different, the Contras referred to Nicaragua and the Contra

rebel faction that was being backed by the Reagan White House to topple the Sandinista government.

That was sort of the left wing seen as Marxist.

And so you had the 1979 Revolution in Iran, which made it illegal to sell arms to Iran

because of the arms embargo.

And then Democrats in the early 1980s passed something called the Boland Amendment, which

prohibited any U.S. government money from going to the Contras in Nicaragua.

What year was that again, I'm sorry?

This is in the early 1981, so the Democrats say you can't fund the Contras in Nicaragua

and also you can't sell weapons to Iran because of the arms embargo.

So you had these two different illegal things that were banned by Congress, which is supposed

to hold the executive branch to account, but you had an executive branch that wanted to

do it anyway, so they had to find a way to get creative.

And this starting point, I think, is very useful to understand how the intelligence apparatus

moves when it knows it's not supposed to do something, but believes that it can creatively

find a way to do it anyway.

So what happened in the early 1980s is they said, okay, we can't get U.S. aid money to

fund the Nicaraguan Contras.

We can't get Pentagon money.

We can't get State Department money.

We can't get CIA money.

How do we still make sure that the Contras have a chance at overthrowing the Sandinista government?

What they worked out was a scheme.

In 1980, the Iraq-Iran War broke out, 1980 to 1988.

And this was when Saddam Hussein's Iraq wanted to, you know, saw the weakness of this

new Iranian government that had just taken power in 1979.

The Iraqis outnumbered the Iranians by two to one in terms of their military and thought

that they could just sweep into Iran and take over huge portions of it.

So Iraq launches this attack on Iran.

And you would think, given that the U.S., Israel, UK all wanted the Iranian government toppled,

that that would be something that we would be supportive of, but there was the retentions

because we didn't want Iraq to have regional hegemony there.

This was, we had a very schizophrenic foreign policy during the Iranian-Iran War because

I think it was Kissinger who quipped.

I wish there was, I only wish there was a way that both sides could lose.

And so, even though we wanted the Iranian regime toppled and weakened, we didn't want

Iraq to move in and take it over.

And we were looking for ways to get inroads with the Iranian government in order to work

out some way to allow private industry exploitation of the oil and gas.

Of course, we didn't install the Iranian government in 1953 after there was an attempt

to nationalize the Anglo-British petroleum and U.S. UK oil interests.

1979, though, our guy gets evicted.

Iran looks like it's going to be taken over by Iraq.

And so, in order to basically do a favor for the government of Iran with the expectation

that they would be doing favors back, we organized an illegal arms sale to them through

Adnan Khashoggi, who was the biggest weapons dealer in world history, and for perspective

on that, Adnan Khashoggi made three times more in a single year as a commissions agent

for Lockheed Martin than every other weapons dealer commissioned by Lockheed Martin combined.

Three times more than everybody else combined.

He was distantly connected to the Royal Family, the Saudi Arabia.

He moved in the same networks as Epstein did, and Epstein would brag in 1987 that he

was one of his key clients.

Trump would actually later buy Khashoggi's yacht, I think in 1989 for something like $70

million.

Not sketchy at all.

Well, it was a crazy network in the early 80s, and it's amazing to look back on now because

of everything that's happening with Iran, U.S., Israel, UK, Iran.

This same proxy war that we've been fighting there since the 1950s is very much a key focus

of U.S. foreign policy today.

As it's interesting that the Epstein affair is popping off at the same time as this tension

is being renewed, because it's a good opportunity to excavate the tombs of both of those.

What happened was the plot in the Iran Contra was to use outside brokers to sell the weapons

to Iran from Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then skim the proceeds of the weapon sales to

fund the Contras.

It would still be compliant with the Bolin Amendment, the prohibition from Congress on direct

funds coming.

It basically would be doing one illegal operation off the books covertly to fund another operation

off the books covertly.

It was a little bit too clever by half.

What ended up happening was Anand Kishoggi in 1983 flies to Washington, D.C., to meet

with the National Security Advisor, Robert McFarland.

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That's the head of the National Security Advisors, the head of the National Security Council.

That is the sort of apex predator of the military intelligence and diplomatic state.

That is sort of the highest level in the cabinet.

The National Security Advisors meets with the President every day.

The Secretary of State may only meet once a week with the President.

It's a little weird right now because Rubio, Secretary Rubio is both Secretary of State

and the interim head of the National Security Council.

The National Security Advisors, the head of the National Security Council, which controls

the interagency.

Everything that's done state, everything that's done at CIA, everything that's done at

DOD, has to be run through and approved by the National Security Council.

So Kishogi flies in 83 to Washington to the White House to meet with the head of the

National Security Council to pitch this scheme that if the U.S. supplied arms to Israel by

way of Adnan Kishogi, the Israeli side would handle the weapon sales to Iran and then

would funnel skim to the contras in Nicaragua to fund the Nicaraguan side of Iran-Contra.

So you have like very different, I think last time I was here, we pointed to the world map

and we pointed out how far Pakistan was from Cuba.

It's about the distance of Iran to Nicaragua.

Now this whole thing moved through offshore bank accounts and because not only do you need

to have discrete offshore foreign financiers who are arranging for the money and the illegal

weapons sales to do another thing that's illegal under Congress, but now you need to make

the money illegal.

You need to launder the money so that the proceeds can't be tracked back because it's illegal

under the arms embargo to sell those weapons.

And so what the U.S. did is we created CI proprietary banks in the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands.

We took money from those sales and then we pushed it into the offshore banking network.

Switzerland, Panama, and also set up a whole logistics chain to support the contras.

And this is where it gets back to the sort of drug story.

Because what you're doing here is you're running guns and drugs from the Nicaraguan

Contra side.

You have the weapon side in Iran and then on the Latin American side you need, how do

you get the contrast to defeat the Sandinistas?

Well they need guns, lots of them, matric style.

The U.S. was basically tank or the Morpheus figure giving the guns, but the other way

was the sale of drugs, which is yet another illegal thing that has to be done covertly.

Now the CIA had started with the Department of War before it was called the Department

of Defense.

In the 1940s, the Department of War was running drugs through the golden triangle that

the Kuomintang sat on.

This is the Chang'ai-shek Chinese nationalists against the Chinese communists.

We were taking the opium fields that basically the Kuomintang sat on and we were running

them to convert to cash to buy guns.

So you basically have this pipeline of drugs to cash to guns.

That's how we get guns.

That's the most American thing I've ever heard of my life.

It is.

So what started is a British thing.

The modern posture contract China started with the opium wars in the 1800s.

The reason that Hong Kong was a British territory was because it was seized by the British because

the Chinese did not want to buy the drugs that British India was growing and the drugs

were a giant commercial trade profit for the British Empire.

China was a huge market.

When China started having all these opium den issues, they announced a blanket ban on

the purchase of British opium and that's when the Brits invaded, bombed the whole South

China Sea front, seized Hong Kong, and then flash forward to the 1940s and you had these

how do you fund a war when you don't have USAID money?

This is something that I think is so topical now as USAID was just shuttered July 1st.

And now the State Department is inheriting its portfolio.

So wait, you're not the spokesman anymore?

You lost your salary?

I didn't know this was going to be false advertising.

Well, USAID may be dead, but what's that?

The king is dead long live the king.

USAID may be dead, but the USAID function will have a permanent life in America.

So let's not go on like we're working for policy.

It's being moved into the state department and into other, its function is being pushed

into other places like the US development finance corporation.

And that also plays into the Iran Controversy.

So just put the button on this.

We had a long history in Southeast Asia of doing drugs for cash for guns.

But when it came to the, when it came to the continental United States, this was a big,

big no.

And then you end up having the retail product coming back to American streets.

And this is what popped off in the 1980s, the National Security Council and Central Intelligence

Agency and US military were running a supply network to the Contras, but again, all because

they couldn't get USAID money to do it or State Department or DOD grants.

They had to use other sources of funds like black market commerce from the drugs.

So they would take the coca leaves that had been cultivated by the US military as a way

to fund the anti-Marxist right wing death squads that were all over Latin America during

the Cold War.

And they flew them to places like Mina, Arkansas, which was in the 1980s under Bill Clinton's

control.

Bill Clinton.

Barry Seals.

Yeah.

But Mina, Arkansas was this little air force base in, well, there was a little town population

about 1,000 people.

And it was used as a CIA base to run drugs into.

They also used ports and Miami for this as well.

And they would fly the drugs in, they'd wash the cash, and then they'd send guns back

over the border to the Nicaraguan Contras.

And one of the main transports for this was a CIA proprietary airline called Southern

Air Transport.

Southern Air Transport was formerly Air America.

These are both CIA proprietary airlines.

The CIA doesn't really do this anymore.

Like, I'm sure about that.

Well, they do it through USAID.

They do it through the development finance corporation.

They do it through outside finance years.

But you can actually go back and look, even in the JFK files, there's great documentation

that's been declassified about this change in structure, because it's very difficult

to run this as a covert operation without getting busted.

At its high, Air America had about 20,000 employees.

This is, yeah, yes, because it had all these spindle airlines, they had continental air services

at Southern Air Transport.

And it's all a CIA.

Right.

So, you can see why they got busted so many times on this.

When the CIA funds something directly, this is how you have USAID having three times the

budget of the CIA now.

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We need to buy for Kate this function of funding and directing.

If they're funded by the US government, they're an asset.

He pays the piper calls the tune.

It doesn't really matter if the funding is coming from the CIA, if it's coming from

someone in the US government who's in on it and understands the purpose of these funds.

And the subject group who's being instrumentalized knows that they need to do what's asked

of them if they want to keep the money flowing.

But at the time, and then, this is, because remember, this is all before these big sets

of reforms happened in the early 1980s, it was, you had Air America around for, you know,

30 years at that time.

And so Southern Air Transport was moving the, you know, the whole supply chain around

the drugs, cash, and guns.

Now Southern Air Transport would come back later into the story.

One of the places that it touched down frequently was the US Virgin Islands in St. Thomas,

which is two miles away from Little St. James.

Yeah, dangerously close.

Right, right.

And remember, this is, you have Jeffrey Epstein saying, in 1987 at the height of Iran

control that Adnan Khashoggi was a client of his, you have Jeffrey Epstein later purchasing

the island right next door to, that you actually fly into St. Thomas if you want to get to

Little St. James, the exact place where Southern Air Transport was.

And then in 1994, so Southern Air Transport gets in a lot of trouble during the Iran

control scandals.

John Kerry, who would later become Secretary of State and run for president against, against

George W. Bush, the Skolan Bones election.

Yes, the Skolan Bones election, where both, both the, both sides of the aisle were Yale

boys.

They can't talk about it.

That's a great clip.

So John Kerry actually leads the investigation, and if you look this up, if you want, it's

called the Kerry report into the drug running allegations about the Central Intelligence

Agency during Iran control.

What year is this?

This is in the mid 1980s into the mid 1990s.

But that's when he's running the investigation because he's a senator at the time.

He's senator, John.

Interesting.

Put a pillow in that.

Yes.

Yes.

And you know, who else was all over the story, Maxine Waters?

Yes.

Auntie Maxine was on it.

Come on.

Oh, she was leading the charge.

I love her.

If you go to YouTube and you look at John Deutsch CIA, Los Angeles, and you can watch what

would end up happening, and just while I was looking that up, I'm going to just set the

stage a little bit here.

So people are familiar a little bit maybe with the story of Gary Webb, who is this independent

journalist who's working for the San Jose Mercury News.

Did you see, did you see what Tommy, the T-shirt, Tommy G was wearing and we'll walk you

when we got abducted?

No, no, no.

It was a giant shirt that said Gary Webb never forget.

Yep.

Well, you can't forget now because this is very much a USAID story and a question for how

we're going to deal with this for foreign policy.

So okay.

So look up, look up his Los Angeles.

I think it was in Compton.

Look up a cocaine Los Angeles.

Oh, no, you can keep John Deutsch in there.

Yeah, yeah.

So just before we play this, I'm going, yeah, okay, so the second one, the second one,

but there's a whole, I think there's a whole hour as well if you, it was in a gymnasium

there and then believe me, let's go down a little bit more, if not we can just stick

a second.

Should we add full testimony on the end of that, or is that the 129 right there?

Is that, well that's, that's some taken questions for an hour and a half.

Let's, we can go with, we can go with the second one there.

If you just load that up and then I'll just, let me just set the stage a little bit.

Yeah, you set the stage.

So a couple of things to keep in mind here.

Southern Air Transport was the CI proprietary used for this operation in Iran Contra.

Southern Air Transport is based in Miami because Miami is the big port that took to the

whole Caribbean and to Latin America.

Southern Air Transport moves in 1994 to Columbus, Ohio to service the limited.

The limited at the time was the largest retail chain in the United States.

Wexner.

Wexner, yes.

And by the last Wexner, the financial sponsor for, for Jeffrey Epstein.

And Jeffrey Epstein in 1991 was given durable power of attorney over all of the limited

over as well as the Wexner Foundation.

So the Ohio Development County office worked out this deal to give tax incentives to the

CI proprietary airline to pack up and move from Miami to move to Rick and Bachar Air Force

Base, you know, a milked and literally to move to a military Air Force Base to service

Jeffrey Epstein's company, basically, because he had durable power of attorney, meaning

he was the authorized signatory on the paperwork.

So you have a CI proprietary airline that's moving guns and drugs in cash for Iran Contra.

In 1994, it packs up to service Jeffrey Epstein and his sponsor, Les Wexner, so that they

can move goods back and forth from Hong Kong is how they described it.

Interestingly, the limited also bought a big gun range gun company, sporting goods and

hunting equipment thing in 1994, right as Southern Air Transport is moving to Columbus,

so Ohio, the limited buys up a bunch of gun stores.

I mean, this is the same thing that happened in Fast and Furious when, you know, when, you

know, the FBI and ATF were, you know, basically working out secret agreements with gun, gun

stores in Arizona, that had interagency approval at CIA, you know, State Department National

Security Council approval for, for Fast and Furious.

That's what cost Obama, Eric Holder is attorney general, but I think it's very curious

that you have the same network that's involved in Iran Contra.

And by the way, Jeffrey Epstein had a fake passport.

It was found in his safe in January 2019 when the FBI raided Epstein's home.

They found a fake July, yeah, yeah, right, I guess July, because that's when he was arrested.

You know, they drilled the hole into his, into his safe and they found a fake passport from

90, that was issued in 1982, expired in 1987, so that's right during Iran Contra.

Very interesting.

And it listed the residents of Saudi Arabia, right, where Adnan Khashoggi was.

And it, now this was, it had Epstein's photo, but a fake name.

And they had four stamps on the passport showing that he went in and out of, went in and

out of Saudi Arabia, went in and out of, I think it was the UK and a couple other countries.

Four times, I mean, this fake passport was so good in the 1980s that he was able to travel

pretty much freely under a fake name internationally while Iran Contra was happening.

But Southern Air Transport moves in 94 to service, Jeffrey, the company, Jeffrey Epstein

had complete control over it, and with durable power of attorney, that means you can sign,

you can broker deals, you can take out loans, you can run the business.

And then Southern Air Transport folds up in, I think October, 1998 in Columbus, the very

day that the CIA confessed to using Southern Air Transport to run the guns and drugs during

Iran Contra, because a lot of the stuff broke open in the 1980s, but it wasn't until

the late 1990s.

I think Dark Alliance was published in 1997 from Gary Webb and these, this John Deutsch,

I think this was in the late 1990s that the CIA director was doing a mea culpa.

He was traveling around to black neighborhoods.

Sorry.

Yeah, basically saying, listen, it was an isolated thing.

It wasn't systematic.

There may have been a little bit of leakage, but we won't do that again.

And so this, this scene is John Deutsch, the then CIA director at a gymnasium.

I think he was in Compton or Inglewood, it was, and Maxine Waters was leading the charge

and you can look that up separately after.

She was the one who was accusing the CIA of, you know, doing this for racial animosity

reasons.

He was basically saying, no, no, no, it wasn't because we hated black people.

It's because, you know, we wanted to fund a possible, no, no, no, listen, we still

love you.

It's a, it was a different dark or opposite thing, but, well, luckily he didn't give

us speech about crack like Hunter Biden did.

I want to made everyone, you know, it would be a little bit more honest.

I would like to see Hunter Biden as, you know, if we made Bobby Kennedy, the head of HHS,

and we made Cash Patel, the head of FBI, listen, if John Ratcliffe is amenable to it, I wouldn't

mind seeing a Hunter Biden, you know, Deputy CIA director, because, you know, it sort

of catch me if you can, right?

Deputy CIA director, because he knows ball, and he knows where the, he knows where the,

the little balls of, what is the cotton cheese that you say on the floor.

And shone him by carbonate, you take out all the liquid and then it's just, it's your

fork.

It's like listening to fucking Michael Jordan talk about basketball.

I really like did want to do crack by the end of that.

I'm not going to find you a woman who loves you as much as Hunter Biden.

You see like like his eyes glaze over where he's just like off into the distance, like

the end of a movie where he's just thinking about it and then he was like, yeah, I'm

going to get to you for if I just keep talking about this.

He's a lexicon for being able to control his own memory.

All right, let's play this.

Got it.

We'll tell you director George has a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective

that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.

It's got to do it just kind of a shame.

All right, all right, all right, obviously that is an answer for a lot of you.

Now can you please?

All right, now can you please?

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Wait a minute.

He's fake writing things down right now.

That is sweating.

Got the ear please.

What do I say?

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute here.

I like the same shape.

You don't like what's going on here.

Please leave now.

I need a McDonald.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Leave now because there are others who do want to hurt Trump hand motions down.

Yeah, she's got to.

She's ahead of her time.

Yeah.

Please take your seats.

I will come back to you as we roll back across to the center section.

It's like a carbon copy actually.

Director George, I will refer you to three specific agency operations known as Ahmadias,

Pegasus and Watchtower.

I have Watchtower documents heavily redacted by the agency.

I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted

to recruit me in the late seventies to become involved in protecting agency drug operations

in this country.

I have been trying to get this out for 18 years and I have the evidence.

My question for you is very specific, sir.

If in the course of the IG's investigations, Fred Hitz's work, you come across evidence of severely criminal activity.

And it's classified.

Well, you use that classification to hide the criminal activity or will you tell the American

people the truth?

All right, you've got to hear the response first from Congressman Julian Dexlin and then from the director.

Like fuck that.

We want the director.

I have been from your, from your, I'm sorry, sir.

I will allow the director to speak first and then Congressman Julian Dexlin.

If you have information about CIA illegal activity in drugs, you should immediately bring that information

to wherever you want but let me suggest three places.

Los Angeles Police Department.

Oh, my God.

He's working for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Oh, my God.

The FBI.

Please.

If I'm sorry, others want to hear this answer.

What a crazy start to that answer.

It is your choice.

Los Angeles Police Department, the Inspector General, or an office of one of your Congress

persons like this.

Who's sitting right there?

He mentioned the head of the CIA, subjecting himself to this now.

No.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute, sir.

And, sir.

You have not done the mic yet.

You are not.

But wait a minute.

Then don't speak out of turn.

Let me say something else.

I love this information.

Turns up wrongdoing.

If it turns up wrongdoing, we will bring the people to justice and make them a cow.

I'll bet you will.

Congressman Dexlin.

Should we pause it right there?

Yeah, you can pause it there.

Remember the headline that came out later.

It said the CIA investigated itself for selling crack in Los Angeles and found no wrongdoing.

Right.

But in 1998, I think it was this 97 or what was the date of this?

The whole thing is fantastic.

1996.

Yeah, so 98, they admitted kind of a limited hangout version of it.

Yes, it was done, but it shouldn't have been done.

It was limited.

It was not supposed to get on the streets of the U.S.

And that was when Southern Air Transport in Columbus, Ohio declared bankruptcy and shut down operations.

It was actually the same day.

You can look up a great article.

98.

Yes.

In fact, if you look at Maxine Waters and CIA 1990s cocaine, she was the hardest charging person on this at the time.

It's funny how the direction of a lot of these go.

These people who run these investigations from the House and Senate side and then they kind of drop it and get magically promoted.

Because Maxine Waters would end up the head of the banking subcommittee in Congress.

Oh, here you go.

In 1998, CIA drug trafficking allegations hearing with Maxine Waters and Gary Webb.

This is in Congress.

This is a year after Gary Webb.

Oh, this is with Gary.

Yes.

Yes.

So she was.

I intention to call members in order, seniority, but I have the advice that the senior member of the two that we expected to hear from has deferred to.

Oh, he was a CIA director too.

To come forward first.

Since you have been out front in trying to help us on this matter and come to grips with it.

And that data had hearings in your district and have had direct involvement.

And we welcome you today.

We welcome your commentary on the report and the observations you may have for us.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

Before I began my testimony, please allow me a moment to express my appreciation to you, Chairman Goss.

Anyway, you can see this is like two and a half hours, so we need to ask this whole thing.

Well, I'm trying to get it.

And you can even see like, you know, LA Times reporting on this and whatnot.

But this was a very big deal in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was, you know, a huge political hot potato.

And a lot of these functions moved over to USAID, rather than having the CI proprietary is doing it.

Stick it under the shell company.

Right.

So this is, we talked last time about USAID's strange role in drug running in Afghanistan, where they were irrigating the poppy crops.

You know, in order to grow the heroin there.

We looked at the suite of Ronald Reagan created NGOs that were involved in that as well.

So for example, when Reagan couldn't get the CI's old powers back in the early 1980s

because Democrats controlled Congress and still hated the CIA, he created a web of government-funded NGOs to do what the CI used to do.

So chief among them, the national down for democracy, which was conceived up by William Casey, the CIA director.

I was just going to ask, how much of this is Reagan doing it versus like Bill Casey being like, Ronnie, I got this.

No.

Exactly.

That's what it was.

And, you know, William Casey's top guy, Raymond Greene, who had done propaganda work for the CIA for about 30 years, midwife, that whole process.

The national down for democracy was set up explicitly.

The head of the national down for democracy, Carl Gershman, publicly told the New York Times, I think in 1986, that the CIA used to get in trouble when, or groups, democratic groups that were seen as subsidized by the CIA used to get in trouble when those revelations were made public.

That's why the endowment was created, the national down for democracy, to fund them so that it didn't look like they were being funded by the CIA, but that's exactly what it was.

It's the same thing with the US Institute of Peace, which was also, I think, in 1984, when that was created, the US Institute of Peace, which had a showdown with the Trump administration.

This is a, it tries to say it's not a government agency, but it's 100% funded by the government.

It has to, it's accountable to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It works in conflict zones, doing the kind of work that the CIA wants to do, but doesn't want to put its fingers on.

It has a mandatory 15-person board, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the head of the National Defense University are three mandatory spots on this board.

So it has to be directed by the Pentagon, the State Department.

Same mandatory spots.

Yes, yes.

Now this ended up being funny because the US Institute of Peace barricaded its doors.

Weapons caches were actually found inside the building when the Trump admin tried to take it over.

They refused to allow the Trump-appointed board members to enter the building.

They deleted reams of documents.

Elon Musk said his doge people found them trying to delete a terabyte worth of financial data, including money to the Taliban.

While the US Institute of Peace was openly telling the Taliban to keep the drugs flowing in Afghanistan, because it would be, it would have devastating economic consequences.

If the Taliban post-2022 shut off the drugs.

Hey, guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button.

It's a huge help.

Thank you.

So you have them funded.

To Afghanistan?

Yes.

Just Afghanistan or other places.

Go to Mike Ben Cyber, and then just type in US Institute Peace, and you can type in drugs next to that, if you want.

If you're not following Mike on X, we're going to have that link down below and on YouTube.

You can follow them in both places, but you tweet up a storm.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you'll see, I'll just, you guys can see the receipts on screen, because it's scroll down.

This is a video.

That's like a two-hour video.

But if you scroll down, down, down, down, down, down.

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Yeah, that one right there.

So, so if you pull that first one.

Is this what?

Go to the one right, the tweet right below.

You can just see this is what it looked like on the U.S. Institute piece website.

Again, this is 100% funded by the U.S. government.

This is the building right next to the Department of State, right there on, on 17th Street.

And what you'll, and what you'll see, this was on their website in June 2023.

The Taliban successful opium ban is bad for Afghans in the world.

That's not AI.

No, that was, that's a, that's a real website.

Yes.

Saying that it will negative economic consequences.

Now remember, the Taliban tried to ban opium in 2000.

Because we were growing, the CIA was using the opium to support the Mujahideen.

The same way we were using the cocaine to support the Contras.

The same way we were using the opium to support the Quomantang.

This is standard war funding for the U.S. military and has been for a hundred years.

And so literally, I mean, I read, the main bank in Iran Contra was called BCCI.

Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Went down in flames.

It was a CIA bank.

CIA used it for all the drug money and gun running that was done for the Mujahideen when the CIA created effectively the Mujahideen.

And funded them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

They would then become ISIS in Al Qaeda, where we would continue to back them until now you have ISIS al Qaeda.

ISIS al Qaeda is the government of Syria.

But at the time, we were still pumping up the Syrian rebel forces.

This is a nicer version, though.

The current ISIS al Qaeda is a very nice, urgent version.

Right.

But so you'll see that the Taliban had the same problem China had in the 1800s,

where after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2000.

In fact, you can pull, if you pull this up in another tab, you can even, if you just look at, you know, just Google Taliban shut down of what a poppy and heroin in the year 2000.

Is Mike, is this what Sean and Sean Ryan and his source, the guy legend?

Is this some of what they were talking about like a year, a year and a half ago?

I believe it's related. I believe this, this is part of the reason that we fund the Taliban in order to bribe them to keep these sorts of things going.

Because this is how we support all of our proxy forces in Central Asia.

Got it.

Oh, here you go. Look at that.

Also from the United States.

Look at this. What the Taliban poppy been.

But go back in time. Look at, look at the evolution of this.

Go to the year 2000. Just, just, just go to like Google.com and you'll just, you'll just see, because we'll come back to this so you can see the history.

Oh, here you go. Repeating the similarly successful 2000, 2001 prohibition.

But if you, if you look at what happened, the Taliban shut down the poppy in 2000.

That's 2001, 9-11 happens. Where do we first go?

We don't first start with Iraq. We start with Afghanistan right after the poppy ban.

In 2001, late 2001, we invade Afghanistan and it goes from being zero percent.

Because about what 70% of the world's heroin supply was, was being sourced from the Golden Crescent in Afghanistan.

Taliban shut it down. We invade the very next year in under US military occupation.

We end up turning Afghanistan into 90% of the world's heroin supply.

I think it's something like 95% of Europe's heroin supply.

And that was all under US military occupation stopping them from shutting down the drugs.

But yeah, I guess.

Oh, this is four months before 9-11.

Taliban's ban on poppy a success US aid say the first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule

have concluded that the movements ban on opium poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year.

Official said today the American findings confirm early reports from the United Nations Drug Control program that Afghanistan,

which supplied about three quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe had ended poppy planting in one season.

But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families.

And experts say it will not be known until the fall planting season begins, whether the Taliban can continue to enforce it.

And then the fall hits.

And then the fall hits we invade and it goes from zero percent to 90% of the world's heroin.

That's right.

The US military occupation.

And where is that money going?

That's going to fund our proxy forces in the region.

This would go on to fund the Syrian rebel groups.

If you look at you'll see all sorts of NGO commentary about how ISIS and al-Qaeda are part of these huge international drug smuggling operations.

And oh my gosh, they're smuggling the drugs under Taliban.

Yeah.

They were our proxy group.

We commanded the Taliban to keep those drugs flowing so that they could be instrumentalized and toppled Bashar al-Assad.

And anyway, so you saw that same thing happening in the Western hemisphere during the 1980s.

I believe it's still a very significant part of US geopolitics in Latin America today.

But you had to run this through these international networks where you could maintain plausible viability.

And so, you know, this is Trump was the first person to declare these narco networks a terrorist group.

And if you look at the New York Times, the New York Times ran the same type of headlines that the US is two of pieces.

If you go back and you look at what was it?

February or something of 2025 and New York Times was arguing that there were negative economic consequences

for Trump's ban, you know, a designation of narco groups as being a terrorist group.

I was being a terrorist class.

And what I'm getting at here, though, is this Iran-Contra story is a way to understand pretty much...

We have not yet evolved past the Iran-Contra stage of evolution.

We had these phases of intelligence work.

1940s, 1970s, you'd have CI proprietarys.

You would have basically no oversight.

You wouldn't need any sort of written sign-off for it.

Then you have the reforms from the 1980s.

Yes, church committee, you know, Carter reforms.

So NGOs, outside financiers, offshore banks became the state of play.

And now we are in a period of a kind of third reform.

And there are very dramatic reforms happening to the intelligence community as we speak.

USAID, which took the baton for funding this in the 1980s, has now been gutted.

14,000 people have been laid off.

The agency has been shut down.

Only 230 people have been kept from USAID and they've been moved into the state department.

This is fundamentally a state department role.

If you go back and you look at the initial structuring, contemplation, debates that were happening in 1948,

the CIA didn't need to be its own agency.

It was a state department role.

You gave the CIA its cloak of plausible liability under NSC 10-2.

He initially thought you might be able to not have the CIA do this separately.

It could just be a state department bureau of organized warfare is what he was referring to it as.

He said the problem is though, because of the public transparency of the state department's budget,

it might be infeasible to keep it at the state department because we could not conceal these funds in the state department's budget.

This is how you ended up with this CIA being the place that the operations wing of it was.

Because at the time in April 1948, the CIA was mostly conceived of as being for intelligence collection

and spycraft rather than operations.

Exactly.

But USAID is the same thing.

USAID does not need to be a separate function unless you want to hide something.

Why the state department is matching grants for most of what USAID does.

If you look at a USAID-funded entity, probably at least 30-40% of the time you will see a matching grant from the state department for a smaller amount.

But where the state department bureau of democracy, human rights and labor will give a grant to something that's also USAID funding.

But a lot of times USAID will fund completely on its own.

And this is because the independence of USAID allows it to hide.

It doesn't have to, it's not part of the National Security Council.

So you doesn't need to be cleared by the White House.

It maintains fierce independence.

The only way to get something out of USAID is through the inspector general's office.

They're who basically jumps on the grenade every time.

This is why the Senate complains that they even Senate oversight can't get, you know, even we went over last time,

can't even get a broad summary description of what many of the operations that it's doing.

Because people will die if even Senate oversight is briefed on what the program actually is.

So we're running into this now, which is like, how do you, how do you deal with the problem of a perceived need to do covert action?

And what structure could this proceed in where it does not allow you to run it as rogue as something like Iran contra was?

Because the agencies and the networks that were involved are still very much around today.

And I get back to this. This is one of the reasons I think you can't touch Jeffrey Epstein or you can't touch.

You can't get to the heart of the issue.

Stay, by the way, with the mic just don't talk over it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right there. Perfect.

The heart of the issue is I see it is Epstein's links to intelligence.

And I know that there's a lot of debate over Epstein's ties to Trump and Trump world.

And they are extensive because Trump, Trump came up through this Iran contra network.

I mean, he through, look at things like the casinos and the hotels and the real estate deals around Trump.

And Trump's ties to figures like Roy Cohn and the like.

That goes back to the 70s. Yeah, it does.

But these were all networks that became activated for foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran in 1979 and became big money networks.

And there has been this question about whether or not Epstein belongs to intelligence, especially since July 2019 when Epstein was arrested the second time.

And then you had Trump's Secretary of Labor, who was the guy who cut the deal for Epstein in 2008,

reportedly saying to the Trump transition team that the reason he cut the sweetheart deal was because Epstein belonged to intelligence and back off and leave it alone.

And we've never gotten an answer about whether or not that is true or false.

Epstein is arrested for the second time on July 6, 2019.

July 9, 2019, Vicki Ward puts out that article saying that in the Daily Beast that a cost of told the Trump transition officials that Epstein belonged to intelligence.

And that's the reason he cut the sweetheart deal.

The next day, July 10, there's 2019, this is the last public state and then we've gotten from Alex Acosta on this.

He gave a public press conference that's on YouTube, everyone can watch it.

Was that the one on the White House long when he resigned?

No, this was indoors at a podium while he was still fighting the scandal.

He tried to basically answer reporter's questions.

It was the last question, it's about an hour and a half YouTube video, I think, around like the 55-minute mark, Alex Acosta is asked, point blank.

I think by a Reuters reporter, did you really say that Epstein belonged to intelligence as Vicki Ward reported just yesterday?

And Alex Acosta kind of shuffles, smirks a little bit and then says, I can't answer that question because of Justice Department ethics rules.

All I can say is, you know, don't believe everything that you read in the media.

I know it's tempting to go down rabbit holes but I can either, basically said I can either confirm nor deny.

Now, earlier in that same press conference, Acosta would stipulate that something had Justice Department ethics rules about him not apining on.

And he would say, I'm going to try to answer the question anyway.

And in this case, he didn't.

And then, you know, there's a little bit of a long and winding road here where in November 2020, the Justice Department's internal investigation claimed to sort of put this to bed in a 348-page report.

That took them 21 months of investigation to work out.

And all they have is a single footnote, footnote 244 on page 169, where they said we asked Acosta if Epstein, if he had knowledge Epstein was an intelligence asset.

And Acosta replied, quote, the answer is no.

But there's a lot of hair on that.

Usually, when you ask someone, like, if you ask me, do you like sugar in your coffee, I'll be like, no, I won't like start with the answer is no.

Usually, I'll be worked up to that through some other chain of questioning.

They don't attach the transcript.

First of all, I don't think that Epstein was an asset in the 201 file sense of it.

I don't think he would have been recruited as a human intelligence asset who answered to a case officer.

Why not?

Because if you look at the function that it looked like Epstein had through from the 1980s into the mid-2000s.

You think he was just a financier?

I think he was a contact, what they call a cooperative contact, where liaison or facilitator or friend of the station.

If you look at the role that CIA outside financiers have, they're almost never assets.

They almost never have 201 files. They're almost never recruited.

They are relationships of convenience where they will do business together when it profits both sides.

But they largely have an independent life from each other.

I don't think Epstein was full-time or did everything that was asked of him.

A great example of this is another scandal that played out during Iran Contra, which was the so-called Iraqi, the Iraq pipeline affair.

This was another case that involved the same set of countries, or at least very similar sets of countries, in the case of Bruce Rappaport.

In the late 1980s, and if you want, you can pull up an article called Intrigue in High Places, I think it was New York Times, January 31, 1988, I think is when this was published.

You can also go to YouTube and you can play a couple minutes of an NBC clip that covers the broad strokes of this well.

But essentially what happened was the U.S. National Security Council, here you go, yeah, Intrigue in High Places.

In fact, if you want to play the NBC clip just so you guys can get a quick overview of this.

If you go to YouTube and you type in Iraq, oil pipeline, Edmonds, 1988, you'll see this.

And what I want to draw a line to is Jeffrey Epstein and other financiers who had their own life, but frequently worked with CIA or National Security Council, as well as foreign governments like the Israelis, the Brits, the French, the Saudis.

Is this what you want right here?

And there's an NBC one. If you type in NBC, yeah, and Mises is a ME.

Yeah, 1988, NBC.

Yeah, that's second one. Yeah, there you go.

So what you'll see here is the same sort of networks.

Now this is five minutes, but if you skip about halfway through, it gets to the guts of it.

Yeah, you tried that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's play it.

That's a way to see how that's how that would progress.

But sources confirm a New York Times story today that McKay has told senior White House officials that Nice had a quote important and sustained role in pushing the billion dollar pipeline project.

What's at issue is a federal law, which makes the Attorney General responsible for prosecuting American citizens who try to bribe foreign officials.

House Majority Leader Foley was asked if Mises should step aside during the investigation.

Whether the Attorney General continues in office is a matter for human for the President to decide.

Hate say the President is strongly supporting his old friend and his adamant that Mises wasn't designed.

I see no reason on earth for the President to take any action.

Unless and then they'll give a description in a couple of years.

I think Mr. Mises done something wrong officials here say they have no indication at this time that McKay intends to invite me.

But they admit that the special prosecutor has not ruled that out.

Robin Lloyd NBC News at the White House and video has 62 views.

In this latest controversy, Mises finds himself caught up in an international web of big oil, big influence and big money.

In 1983 is the Persian Gulf War grew hotter. Iraq looked for a safer way to get its oil out of the Gulf.

A plan was devised for a billion dollar pipeline that would stretch from Iraqi oil fields to Jordan onto the Red Sea passing within miles of the Israeli border.

The pipeline was to be built by the U.S. firm Bechtel, but before Bechtel or anyone would put money into the project.

They wanted assurances from then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez that Israel would not attack the pipeline.

Bechtel hired Bruce Rappaport, a Swiss businessman with strong ties to Perez.

Rappaport in turn hired San Francisco lawyer E. Robert Wallick, a close friend of Attorney General Mises.

And that's where the Mises connection and his troubles begin.

It is a 1985 memo from Wallick to Mises that reportedly talks about payoffs to Israelis for protection of the pipeline.

But in a Jerusalem newspaper today, Perez denied he was offered a bribe.

And in a telephone interview from Switzerland, Bruce Rappaport also denied any bribery attempt.

Well, I can tell you that I have never known what I even dreamed. I don't think that anybody could dare to propose to Shimon or anybody else like that money in Israel.

Meanwhile, Special Prosecutor James McKay is also investigating any possible connection between Rappaport and late CIA director William Casey, as well as the role played by the National Security Council.

Sources say, then National Security Advisor Robert McFarland is considered a witness, not a target in that probe.