Gavin de Becker

i.e.

the Saudis, and that there was no hacking involved.

My question was, why the hell do you want me to say those two things specifically?

And I already knew the answer, of course, because there was outside influence and there was hacking.

Their request for me was so strange that we didn't go along with it.

Bezos ultimately wrote a Medium post talking about it publicly and saying, hey, if I can't stand up to this, then where is a regular person?

Yeah, I won't even comment on whether those pictures exist because they were doing a fascinating thing, by the way.

It's sort of like selling you land in Florida that's marshland and doesn't exist.

They were doing an extortion on a thing they didn't even have.

Right.

So it's kind of a double crime.

It's an extortion and fraud.

Some of it I don't talk about because I have a fair amount of inside information, and I'm just watchful about not getting near the line.

I mean information that I might have gotten from— I'm characterizing it carefully— that I might have gotten from government agencies that are clients, or that I might have gotten because—

clients were uh were implicated like i learned today for example this morning on the way over here that i'm in the epstein files oh really and here's the way i'm in there is that someone sent epstein an article that i wrote called fooling ourselves into war and so somebody sent that uh article

which is an article I really like, by the way, published in Huffington Post at the time.

And they sent that to Epstein.

So that's an example of being in the Epstein files and yet obviously never having met Epstein.

But I have a few clients and friends who the Epstein group made approaches on and failed, meaning they tried to get them and failed.

I'll give you one story without naming the person, of course.