July 22, 2025

From Russia (To Jeffrey), with Love (Craig UNGER)

Holy cat. Craig Unger pegs the Russia-Epstein angle.



From Russia(to Jeffrey), with Love

The Epstein saga is even more interesting when you look at the Russian women who helped run his operation. Here's a look at Svetlana Pozhidaeva.

Craig Unger
Jul 21, 2025

EXCERPT...

Raised in a Moscow apartment complex built for staffers of the NKVD, the Stalinist precursor of the KGB, Pozhidaeva was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the prestigious academy run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is a training ground for Russian diplomats and intelligence officials. Reputed to be the most elite university in the country, MGIMO has been dubbed the “Harvard of Russia” by Henry Kissinger because it has trained so many figures in Russia’s political, intellectual, and financial elite.

According to the Italian edition of Maxim, Lana gave up a promising tennis career at the age of sixteen to become the youngest freshman at MGIMO, where she graduated with the equivalent of summa cum laude, having mastered, along the way, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as if she were on course to join the Foreign Ministry.

But then her career took a bizarre turn. Her stellar academic credentials notwithstanding, Pozhidaeva somehow ended up becoming a model who was represented by MC2, a modeling agency owned by Epstein-pimp-to-be Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in which several young models accused him of drugging their drinks, groping them sexually, and rape. The CBS reporter, Craig Pyes, told Michael Gross. the author of Model: The Ugly Truth of Beautiful Women, that Brunel “ranks among the sleaziest people in the fashion industry. We’re talking about a conveyor belt, not a casting couch. Hundreds of girls were not only harassed but molested.”

SNIP...

“What was most striking about Pozhidaeva was that she had a terrific academic career in Russia and then threw it away on something completely unrelated. She attended, as she says, a top college in Russia, like Stanford in the United States,” said Shvets. “And she was a straight‑­ A student. This is important to understand. She sacrificed four years and then two more years for a master’s degree. It’s an achievement.”

But suddenly after this, Shvets noted, “She says, ‘Fuck it all. Fuck my previous six years. Fuck everything I was doing.’ I mean, it’s­ amazing— it just does not happen in real life.”

“Of course, we know what Epstein was doing with the ladies. But in this particular case,” Shvets told me, “Epstein takes her and introduces her to renowned American and international scientists.”

CONTINUES...

https://substack.com/inbox/post/168787871

July 21, 2025

Jeffrey Epstein: how US media - with one star exception - whitewashed the story

Not fake news. The Guardian brings up a major threat to democracy: corrupt news media.

We likely wouldn’t know squat about Epstein & Associates without the Miami Herald.

Original DU post from August 2019: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212367573

July 19, 2025

Happy they credited The Guardian

Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year

Donald Trump, then 45, with contestants in the 1991 Look of the Year competition, the year he was a judge

In the early 90s, Donald Trump judged the world’s biggest modelling competition - since hit by allegations of abuse. This is how the people who were there remember it

By Lucy Osborne, Harry Davies and Stephanie
The Guardian, 14 March 2020

Excerpt…

It’s not clear how Casablancas first met Trump but, according to several former models who encountered him during the 1980s, the businessman became a regular at his parties. With the opening of Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1983, and the acquisition of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 1985, Trump had gained the reputation of a high-flying playboy in his own right. In 1987 he published The Art Of The Deal, and a flurry of publicity followed. “He sits atop a $3 billion empire,” proclaimed the Washington Post, “and seems to have a Midas touch.”

It was perhaps unsurprising that Trump, a New York celebrity who liked to date beautiful women, should come to know the city’s best-known model agent. “Trump was good with PR and that was something John liked,” says Jeremie Roux, who now runs System, a modelling agency he cofounded with Casablancas in 2009. “Good or negative press was all good to Trump.”

Patty Owen, an Elle and Cosmopolitan cover star, recalls seeing Trump at Elite parties as far back as 1982. “He would always be at the bar. That’s where he would stay and that’s where all the new models would hang out,” she says. “Whenever I saw him, I was always like: why does John have to invite him?” Barbara Pilling, also then an Elite model, told us Trump asked her out for dinner in the summer of 1989 at an industry soiree. She recalls Trump asking how old she was. “I said 17 and he said, ‘That’s just great – you’re not too old, not too young.’”

Continues…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/14/teen-models-powerful-men-when-donald-trump-hosted-look-of-the-year

July 17, 2025

Jeffrey Epstein's Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The leather-bound book was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell. The president says the letter ‘is a fake thing.’

It was Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, and Ghislaine Maxwell was preparing a special gift to mark the occasion. She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump.

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-jeffrey-epstein-birthday-letter-we-have-certain-things-in-common-f918d796

---

Anyone got a link to non-paywall version?

July 16, 2025

FOX News Host Declares His NAZI Pride On-Air

Greg Gutfeld is the name.

The NAZI asshole recommends other NAZIs learn "from the Blacks" to use the "N-word" NAZI like hip-hop and rap artists did to take the stigma off the N-word.

I kid you not.

July 16, 2025

Trump Executive Order to Help Open Up 401(k)s to Private Markets

The post my retirement has been waiting for!



Trump Executive Order to Help Open Up 401(k)s to Private Markets

by Miriam Gottfried, Dylan Tokar, Matt Wirz

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order in the coming days designed to help make private-market investments more available to U.S. retirement plans, according to people familiar with the matter.

The order would instruct the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide guidance to employers and plan administrators on including investments like private assets in 401(k) plans, the people said.

The details of the order aren’t yet final and are still subject to review, the people said.

An order could help pave the way for big managers of private assets such as Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to access the vast sums of retirement savings held by workers who don’t have a traditional pension. Institutional investors such as pension funds have largely maxed out on private markets, leading firms to look to individual investors for new sources of growth.

In theory, retirement plan sponsors can already put some of their investments in private funds and some already do in small quantities. But many companies remain concerned they would be sued by their employees over the higher fees associated with private-market investment products.

Continues…

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-executive-order-to-help-open-up-401-k-s-to-private-markets/ar-AA1IFFDr

July 14, 2025

Did Epstein hire Melania?

Did Epstein provide Melania a genius grant or grease her way into the country?

Epstein knew everybody, in a manner of speaking.

Would explain her sudden reappearance at her traitor man's side.

July 14, 2025

"I wish her well."

Epstein's brother said Jeffrey introduced the first couple, who first copulated aboard one of Jeffrey's jets.

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU08/20250227/117951/HHRG-119-JU08-20250227-SD006-U6.pdf



"I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

July 12, 2025

Epstein and Just Us

Alexander Acosta — When serving as a US Attorney, former Secretary of Labor Acosta arranged a most lenient plea deal that served to protect child sexual predator Epstein from his accusers and justice.

https://www.vox.com/2019/7/10/20689416/jeffrey-epstein-alexander-acosta-labor-secretary-deal



The more complete story, courtesy of US Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts):

Salon: After giving Epstein "deal of a lifetime," Alex Acosta tried to slash anti-trafficking program

July 10, 2019

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the former federal prosecutor who gave financier Jeffrey Epstein a light plea deal when he was first accused of sex-trafficking children, tried to cut a program that combats human trafficking by nearly 80 percent.

Acosta is facing numerous calls to resign after Epstein was charged with running a child sex trafficking ring in New York and Florida. Acosta previously served as U.S. attorney in Miami, where his office identified 36 underage victims and issued a 53-page indictment against Epstein in 2007. Rather than face life in prison, Epstein cut the “deal of a lifetime” with Acosta, as the Miami Herald reported, allowing Epstein to plead guilty to two state prostitution charges and serve just 13 months in county jail, where he was allowed to leave to work from his office six days per week. The deal also granted the well-connected billionaire who investigators believed hosted underage sex parties for affluent menimmunity for any unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” A federal judge later found the deal was illegalbecause Acosta did not consult the alleged victims of Epstein's crimes before agreeing to the deal.

Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., says this was not the only time Acosta turned a blind eye to child trafficking.

Acosta’s Labor Department budget proposal for fiscal year 2020 proposed slashing the budget of the International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB) by nearly 80 percent. The agency is charged with combating human trafficking, child labor and forced labor in the United States and around the world.

“This is now a pattern,” Clark told the Guardian. “Like so many in this administration Mr. Acosta chooses the powerful and wealthy over the vulnerable and victims of sexual assault and it is time that he finds another line of work.”

Clark grilled Acosta about the proposed cuts during a hearing in April.

After Clark and Acosta both agreed that more needed to be done to combat trafficking, Clark pointed out that Acosta had also “proposed a budget cut, almost 80 percent, 79 percent to ILAB where this work is done, bringing its budget from $68 million to just $18.5 million.”

“I’m sure you’ve come prepared to justify this cut to us but it doesn’t go unnoticed that this isn’t the first time that you’ve ignored human trafficking,” Clark said. “Your office found that there had been a sexual abuse pyramid scheme that involved at least 36 underage girls. … Mr. Epstein raped and recruited these girls … and there is evidence that he allowed his friends to do the same.”

“Epstein should have been looking at a sentence of 366 years at a minimum. But that’s not what happened,” Clark continued. “How can we expect you, the labor secretary, to fight for American workers if you couldn't even fight for these girls?”

The proposed ILAB cuts were not the only Acosta decision to come under fire from human rights advocates. Earlier this year, the Labor Department rolled back Obama-era protections for some human trafficking victims and will now deny certain visas to victims of trafficking or other workplace crimes unless they first consult with another law enforcement agency like the FBI.

Erika Gonzalez, a lawyer for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, told the Daily Beast that the new rule will force victims to jump through “a lot more hoops,” often after they have endured devastating ordeals.

“What the Epstein case shows is when these policies around human trafficking are implemented, they’re not necessarily considerate of the impact on the victims themselves,” Gonzalez told the site. “With the Department of Labor asking the FBI to look into [workplace violations] first, they’re adding another barrier for victims of trafficking to access the services the Department of Labor has.”

While the visa rule change will be implemented by the Labor Department, Democrats are fighting back against the proposed ILAB cuts. In their own 2020 budget proposal, Democrats called for expanding ILAB funding from from $68 million to $122 million.

Acosta’s future at the department remains unclear after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called for him to step down following Epstein’s arrest.

President Trump, a longtime friend of Epstein, meanwhile tried to distance himself and Acosta from Epstein’s alleged crimes Tuesday. Trump claimed he was “not a fan” of Epstein, despite previously having praised him as a “terrific guy” with a penchant for women “on the younger side.” Trump said that Acosta had done a “fantastic job” and insisted, “I do hear that there were a lot of people involved in that [Epstein] decision.”

Asked about the Epstein case on Tuesday, Trump had nothing to say about the victims but lamented the criticism of the prosecutor who let Epstein get off with a slap on the wrist more than a decade earlier.

“I feel very badly actually for Secretary Acosta because I’ve known him as somebody who works so hard and has done such a good job. I feel very badly about that whole situation,” Trump said. “But we’re going to be looking at that and looking at it very closely.”

Source with links any incorruptible Assistant DA can follow:

https://katherineclark.house.gov/2019/7/salon-after-giving-epstein-deal-of-a-lifetime-alex-acosta-tried-to-slash-anti-trafficking-program

July 11, 2025

Trump is tossing citizens in prison without due process...

…destroying the free press, destroying the NATO alliance, manipulating markets and the planet’s economy for chaos and cronies — worst of all, tearing up the Bill of Rights and shredding the Constitution aided by the corrupt Supreme Court he packed — and I’m supposed to accept it as legal and shut up?

I don’t think so. And I thought I knew you.