News: Did Epstein And Bannon Create Pizzagate? + Trump Interferes With Midterms

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Here’s what you may have missed:

Byline Times, Jeffrey Epstein’s 4chan Plan

Epstein appeared to view right-wing populism as an opportunity – and to understand very early how the internet could be used to accelerate it. Rather than simply watching this new ecosystem emerge, however, he seems to have played a part in its formation.

In October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein met with the creator of the anonymous message board 4chan. His conversation with Christopher “moot” Poole took place just days before the fateful relaunch of 4chan’s influential far-right imageboard, /pol/ (shorthand for “Politically Incorrect”). That board in particular, and the site more broadly, would come to serve as a breeding ground for the far-right’s online activism in the years to come.

In an email to Epstein, the late sex-trafficker’s associate and former Bill Gates advisor Boris Nikolic (who introduced Poole and Epstein) cites a Washington Post article from 2010. It describes 4chan as a “hive mind” with a unique power to “understand and control traffic on the internet” and to create “mass disruptions.” “This article describes why I find moot [Poole] interesting,” Nikolic writes. “The potential for manipulation is huge.”

An email exchange from 2019, revealed in the DOJ documents, indicates that an FBI analyst believed a meeting may have taken place between Epstein and two “agent provocateurs”, James Damore and Kevin Cernekee. The author of the email states that the two known right-wing influencers were “believed to have been involved in the promotion of the Pizzagate narrative.”

…At critical junctures in the rise of the online far-right – it’s contagions and its conspiracies – Epstein’s shadow seems to loom in the background. The extent to which the financier and sex-trafficker was a hidden architect may never truly be known. Certainly not without the release of the remaining DOJ files.

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Garbage Day, Here’s how Epstein broke the internet

I had a front row seat to the collapse of the global order. And I believed at the time that I understood what was going on. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, far-right extremists, aided and amplified by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and funded by Republican dark money, infiltrated fringe online spaces. They weaponized disaffected young men, and used sites like Reddit and 4chan to organize a flood of content that influenced the unthinking algorithms on larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there were always holes in that explanation that I could never quite account for. A feeling — one that can be quite dangerous for a journalist trying not fall into the void of conspiracy theories — that there was something bigger going on. And while I can’t say that we have the complete story yet, it does increasingly feel like I was actually, without knowing it, following Jeffrey Epstein around the world the whole time.

Based off the newest tranche of emails and texts released by the Justice Department this weekend, Epstein, at the very least, believed that he was orchestrating the downfall of the global order in the 2010s. In June 2016, he emailed venture capitalist, early Facebook investor, and Palantir founder Peter Thiel, writing, “Brexit, just the beginning.” He then laid out the most succinct mission statement we currently have for what Epstein was trying to accomplish. “Return to tribalism,” he wrote. “Counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as I said in your office. Finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

…Based on the documents we have access to, these were twin obsessions for Epstein: Manipulating what we see online and finding digital alternatives to traditional finance. During the last years of his life, these two ideas would dovetail into one project — building a far-right takeover of Europe with Steven Bannon.

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The Guardian, ICE to spend $38bn turning warehouses into detention centers, documents show

The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, issued a statement opposing the creation of an ICE agency detention center in Merrimack, calling it “outrageous and absolutely the wrong move”.

“ICE is shooting people dead on the street. Mothers have been ripped from cars and separated from children,” the statement said. “US Citizens have been stopped, detained and even killed. Peaceful protesters have been assaulted. Parents are afraid to send kids to school, to go to church, to seek healthcare and report crimes. None of this makes people safer – it makes us all less safe.”

It continued: “We should be opposing ICE’s tactics, not allowing them to expand. We certainly should not be allowing ICE to build new human warehouses when they can’t be trusted to keep people safe and protect due process.”

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Wired, ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next

…over the past several months, ICE and DHS have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.

…In documents viewed by WIRED, ICE has repeatedly outlined its expansion to cities around the US. The September memorandum citing “unusual and compelling urgency” for office expansion states that OPLA will be “expanding its legal operations” into Birmingham, Alabama; Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Tampa, Florida; Des Moines, Iowa; Boise, Idaho; Louisville, Kentucky; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Grand Rapids, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Raleigh, North Carolina; Long Island, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Richmond, Virginia; Spokane, Washington and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The memorandum also states that the existing offices are at maximum capacity and will “require additional space” to accommodate the new employees hired. At the time, the memo states that OPLA had selected almost 1,000 attorneys to hire.

…Together, the leasing plans give a clear picture of where ICE is going next in the US: Everywhere.

To me, this reporting suggests that this summer we’ll see a massive surge in ICE operations across the country, creating unrest, and setting the stage for Trump to capitalize on the chaos by attempting to interfere with the execution of the midterm elections.

Sign up for Wired’s Tracker newsletter, ”a limited-series weekly newsletter following how federal agents are carrying out Trump’s mass deportation program, what’s changing, and what could come next,” here.

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The New Republic, Turns Out There Was Voter Fraud in Georgia—by Elon Musk

In October 2024, the Georgia secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after receiving numerous reports from residents across several counties saying they’d received partially prefilled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC, according to John Fervier, the State Elections Board’s chairman.

There was evidence to suggest America PAC had violated a state law that prohibits any person or entity, other than an authorized relative, to send an elector an absentee ballot application prefilled with the elector’s required information, according to Janice Johnston, the SEB’s vice chairman.

America PAC had also failed to display in a conspicuous location that this was not an official government publication, was not provided by the government, and was not a ballot, Johnston added.

…It should come as no surprise that the only evidence of meddling with people’s votes came from Trump’s own camp—the same thing happened in the 2020 election too.

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Counterspin, ‘The Risk Is Reporting This Like It’s a Normal Political Story’: Interview with Ari Berman on attacks on voting

I’m including a large excerpt from this interview because it is essential for you to be aware of this and to share it with your friends and neighbors.

You can easily stream this interview on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

It’s really crazy. The fact that the FBI just rolled in and took 656 boxes of ballots and election records from the 2020 election was a massive escalation, in terms of President Trump’s attempt to try to take over the election system. They had been talking about getting the ballots for years, but to actually just take them was really shocking.

And then when the affidavit was unsealed, and we saw the quote unquote “evidence” they presented, it was even more shocking. They didn’t have any evidence. It was a bunch of recycled claims from election deniers. It was even crazy that they got a judge to sign off on it, because you need probable cause, meaning that you need evidence of a criminal offense, to be able to get a warrant for this kind of raid. They seemed like they wanted to get the ballots to try to find the evidence. So they were doing it backwards, in the election that took place over five years ago.

So it’s just really, really crazy from the beginning to the end—the fact that they’re still so obsessed with the 2020 election, the fact that President Trump is putting so many resources into trying to relitigate the 2020 election, the fact that he is now involving the FBI, the director of national intelligence, the Department of Justice in this effort, that he’s bringing in debunked election-deniers into the White House.

We now know that this raid was based on an election denier, Kurt Olsen, who was involved with January 6, is now a temporary White House employee, and he was the basis for the FBI raid.

You’re right, though: While it’s been portrayed as about 2020, I think the bigger reason they want the ballots is about 2026 and 2028, so they can say, “OK, we now have definitive proof the election was rigged,” even though it wasn’t, and therefore we have to “nationalize the voting,” as Trump has called for. “We have to take over the voting process.”

And, of course, Fulton County is one of those places where they’re going to try to do that, because we “can’t allow,” in the words of Steve Bannon, another election to be “stolen” again.

…The Minnesota story was the DOJ has been trying to get the voter rolls of Minnesota and other states for quite some time. This is a big project of the Department of Justice. They want the sensitive voter information from all 50 states. They’ve sued 24 states already, mostly blue states but not all blue states, to try to get access to this information.

They want to create this federal database of registered voters, which they could then compare to the Department of Homeland Security’s own databases to try to search for illegal voting. They’re not going to find any, but they could potentially wrongly flag people as noncitizens and say, “Hey, we found the fraud.” And, just like in Georgia, they’ll try to do that so they can take more control over elections.

But what Pam Bondi did is she basically said, “If you want ICE to leave Minnesota, you need to give us your voter rolls.” That was one of the number of conditions that she put out there. And this was shocking, because ICE is supposed to be there, ostensibly, for immigration purposes. Now we know that ICE has gone way beyond what their mandate was supposed to be in Minnesota, but the Department of Justice went even further, to tie the voter rolls to immigration raids, which made it seem like the whole purpose of ICE being there was just as a political front, so that the administration could carry out its political priorities.

To me, Steve Bannon’s close, personal relationship with Epstein, his attempts to destabilize the world with him, and his role as one of the leading pushers of 2020 election lies means the public should regularly be writing to their news outlets and demanding they make Bannon and Peter Thiel the center of their coverage. These guys are the biggest threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we face.

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NPR, Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump

The woman who directly named Trump in her abuse allegation claimed that around 1983, when she was around 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”

Out of more than 3 million pages of files released by the Justice Department in recent months, this specific allegation against Trump appears only in copies of the FBI list of claims and the DOJ slideshow.

But a review of FBI case file logs and discovery documents turned over to Maxwell and her attorneys in the criminal case against her point to one place the claim could have come from — and how serious investigators took it.

The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times. That is according to an FBI “Serial Report” and a list of Non-Testifying Witness Material in the Maxwell case that were also released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Only the first interview, conducted July 24, 2019, is in the public database. That interview does not mention Trump.

…The other woman whose mention of Trump made the DOJ’s presentation appears in Maxwell discovery files released last month in what’s known as a Testifying Witness 3500 material list.

In the first interview of six with the FBI conducted between September 2019 and September 2021, the second woman detailed how Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse began while she was around 13 years old and attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts and described how, at one point, Epstein took her to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club to meet him.

“EPSTEIN told TRUMP, ‘This is a good one, huh,’” the interview report reads.

In a 2020 lawsuit against Epstein’s estate and Maxwell, the second woman added that both men chuckled and she “felt uncomfortable, but, at the time, was too young to understand why.”

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