Michael Weiss

He was easily manipulated.

In fact, when his regime fell, we at New Lines, the other publication I write for, we did a story on documents that were

retrieve showing that the Israelis were telling him all the time, listen, if you allow Iran to do X, Y, and Z, we're going to come and bomb these places.

So he would back off occasionally when given these sort of threatening overtures by the Israelis.

So yeah, using Epstein as a kind of

It may surprise sort of ordinary listeners, but I think this is kind of how the world works.

You know, these horrific people, billionaires or multimillionaires, but, you know, they worm their way into the corridors of power.

They leverage their contacts and their friendships with people in positions of power to acquire more wealth or to acquire more contacts of other people, including, you know,

potentates and dictators abroad, and they sort of connect people.

Epstein was almost like his own private intel shop, in addition to being, you know, a Bond villain and a pedophile with an island.

Yeah.

Well, no, I wouldn't say cute.

He also seems pretty chummy with Noam Chomsky.

And, you know, people you wouldn't

ordinarily expect somebody of this sort of species to to actually that's not true i mean again he's he was so kind of promiscuous in his dealings with everybody um for the sake of his own ego and his own self-gratification that tracks you know i mean the guy was i would say he was a sociopath right sort of the classic mold of one of these international meta mystery leaving aside even the horrible things that he did that's just who he is

The Russians deal with people like this all the time.

I mean, they're either called oligarchs or syloviki, you know, strongmen in positions of power, usually who come from security services, who then go off and do things in private enterprise.

And they end up acting as liaisons or plenipotentiaries, if you want to use a grandiose term for it, for the Kremlin, right?

Dictatorships tend to spawn these kinds of creatures.

So unfortunately, the United States, prior to becoming more authoritarian under Trump,