For nearly a decade, the refrain has been the same: Russia, Russia, Russia. Each time the alarms sound, we’re told to wait for the “smoking gun” — the kompromat tape, the bank record, the document that will finally answer the questions raised by the tortuous relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. And each time, polite company shrugs, dismisses, or simply moves on.

But what if the story was never about one document, one tape, or one transaction? What if the scandal isn’t a theory at all, but a map of simple facts — facts that my guest on this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Craig Unger, has been assembling for years, in plain sight, across real estate ledgers, mob connections, intelligence archives, and the murky world of Jeffrey Epstein? 

Unger is the bestselling author of House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat.  For over a decade, he’s been documenting what he argues is the most audacious intelligence operation in modern history.

In this conversation, Unger argues that what played out in Alaska last week wasn’t just another bizarre Trump-Putin spectacle. It was the latest chapter in a 40-year operation that began when Soviet money came pouring out of a collapsing empire and found a willing conduit in New York’s high-stakes real estate market. From Trump Tower to Epstein’s shadowy orbit, from oligarch cash to NATO’s survival, Unger traces the dots that others have ignored — and shows what they spell when you finally connect them.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It isn’t speculation. It’s the uncomfortable truth that while we’ve been distracted by partisan squabbles, a long-armed intelligence operation has been unfolding before us. And if Unger is right, it’s not just about Trump, or Putin, or even Ukraine. It’s about a threat to the very architecture of Western democracy.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:09] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman.

In the grand theater of geopolitics, where the fate of nations can turn on a single conversation, few moments have carried the weight of what we witnessed this week in Alaska. Against a backdrop that declared pursuing peace, two men met on American soil, one the president of the United States, the other a former KGB official who has become one of the world’s most isolated autocratic leaders since launching the war on Ukraine. But perhaps we’ve been looking at this all wrong. For a decade now, we’ve searched for the smoking gun, the compromising photo, the financial documents, the secret recording that would finally expose the Trump-Russia connection and bring down a presidency. We’ve hunted for kompromat like detectives chasing a single clue, our field of vision narrowed to the scandal that might topple one man. But what if the real story is far more consequential than any individual political career? What if while we’ve been looking for the scandalous details that might change an election cycle, we’ve missed the tectonic shifts reshaping the entire global order? What unfolded at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson wasn’t just diplomacy. It was the latest chapter in what my guest investigative journalist Craig Unger argues is a decades-long relationship that began not in the corridors of power, but in the shadowy world of New York real estate, Russian money, and intelligence operations that stretch back to the 1980s. But the stakes now extend far beyond American politics. The very foundations of Western democracy, the NATO alliance that has secured peace in Europe for eight decades, and the post-World War II international order itself hang in the balance. As Ukrainian cities burn and European leaders watch with growing alarm, some now refusing to share intelligence with the United States, the question isn’t just what Trump and Putin discussed behind closed doors in Alaska. It’s whether we’re witnessing the culmination of what may be one of the most audacious intelligence operations in modern history, one that connects Trump Tower to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, Russian oligarchs to American real estate, and the KGB’s patient cultivation of assets to the very heart of American democracy, with consequences that will reverberate far beyond our domestic political theater.

My guest Craig Unger is a New York Times best-selling investigative journalist who has spent years following the money, the connections, the patterns that others have dismissed as coincidence. His work has taken him to the darkest corners of power, from Russian oligarchs, Manhattan penthouses, to Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island, from KGB archives to Silicon Valley boardrooms. He is the author of the books House of Trump, House of Putin, American Kompromat, and House of Bush, House of Saud, books that have traced the hidden networks of money and influence that shape our world. Today, as we watch the potential unraveling of everything America has built since World War II, we need someone who could help us understand how we got here, and where we might be headed. Craig Unger, welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:03:27] Craig Unger: Thanks for having me, Jeff. It’s great to be here.

[00:03:29] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. It seems that every time Trump and Putin get together, that it goes sideways, that there is something that happens, whether it’s Helsinki, whether what went on in Alaska, and we’ll certainly talk more about that, that is not normal. And yet there is almost a refusal to believe that there is something that has gone on between these two that we just refuse to acknowledge. Talk about that in a general sense first.

[00:04:01] Craig Unger: Right. Well, I think everyone keeps looking for that smoking gun, the smoking gun, whether it’s a video kompromat, or sex tapes, or whatever. And I think while that may or may not exist, there’s a much bigger story that people can’t really see. It’s like it’s too big, so they can’t see what’s in front of their noses. But if you go back to the fall of the Soviet Union, that was widely celebrated, not just in Washington, but throughout the entire Western world. It was declared the “end of history” by Francis Fukuyama, that liberal democracy had won, and communism was dead. So in America, everyone celebrated and kept waiting for the so-called peace dividend. But I think something very, very different was really going on that people haven’t paid attention to. And what happened when Soviet-style communism was finished, the entire Soviet Union was going through enormous change. And you had the birth of the Russian Federation really as a mafia state. And what that meant was you had all these oligarchs who were enormously rich. And once that started happening, and you had state industries that were being privatized, you had billions and billions of dollars, actually more than a trillion dollars, that needed to be laundered. These multibillionaire oligarchs suddenly had all this amount of money, but it’s not really good if it’s only in rubles. So they wanted to get it out to the West, and that meant laundering money. And there is no better way to launder money than through real estate. So they wanted a real estate mogul who had multimillion-dollar condos to sell that could be flipped over and over again. And that’s one very effective way to launder money on a mass scale.

[00:06:15] Jeff Schechtman: And what do we know about how Trump enters this equation? How does his New York real estate effort come in contact with these oligarchs initially?

[00:06:25] Craig Unger: Right. Well, there were two ways, both through the Russian mafia, which wanted to launder money through him. And in 1984, you have a man named David Bogatin, who was, according to FBI files, he was very wired into the Russian mafia, which was a gang run by Semion Mogilevich, who was one of the most powerful people in the Russian mafia. And he came into Trump Tower in 1984. It had just been built the previous year and was getting loads of attention as this new, glamorous, glitziest place to live in New York. And he put down $6 million in cash. That’s the equivalent of about $30 million today. Remember, this is over 40 years ago. And he said to Trump, I’ll take five condos. And in effect, that was laundering money. By that I mean, he satisfied the two predicates of money laundering: One is he was buying it through an anonymous entity, a limited liability corporation, in which his name was not declared, and two, it was an all-cash transaction. Those are the two predicates for money laundering and so far as I can tell, that was the birth of money laundering by the Russian mafia through Donald Trump. And it happened again and again and again. Trump Tower itself, I found at least 13 people tied to the Russian mafia who owned condos or lived in Trump Towers. And in later years, Trump sort of made, stopped doing real estate development and he began to franchise his name to other people like the Bayrock Group, which was actually situated in Trump Tower. It too had ties to the Russian mafia and to Vladimir Putin. And they started developing buildings in Toronto and Soho, Kazakhstan and all over. Trump did not develop those buildings, but he put his name on it and he got a huge chunk of the profits.

[00:08:37] Jeff Schechtman: And what do we know about the nature of Trump’s relationship through all of this with these various oligarchs? How close was that relationship? Were there any in particular that he cozied up to?

[00:08:50] Craig Unger: Well, he certainly cozied up to Bayrock. I mean, they were actually located in Trump Tower. And he built quite a few buildings through them. There was the Trump Soho, the Trump Toronto. There were more buildings in Florida. And he was just using the Trump name. He would get about 18 percent of the profits. If you know the world of franchising hotels, that’s an enormous slice of the profits. If you were to be a Hyatt Corporation, which of course is sort of a blue chip franchise, when someone develops a Hyatt hotel, they pay somewhere between four and seven percent back to the parent company. In Trump’s case, he got 18 percent so it was a pretty good relationship for Trump. And remember, too, that he was up to $4 billion in debt when he started this. He had overexpanded like crazy into Atlantic City with building one casino after another, even after he had saturated the market. So he really needed to get back on his feet. He was $4 billion in debt and six bankruptcies he had filed.

[00:10:13] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the relationship with Putin. How did that evolve?

[00:10:17] Craig Unger: Well, it reminds me of a little boy begging for something, or a guy who desperately wants a date with the pretty girl in high school. He even put out a message when he did, I think it was the Miss Universe pageant, he invited Vladimir Putin to attend. And he said, “Do you think he’ll come? Gee, do you think he’ll become my best friend?” I mean, it was sort of embarrassing, I think, from that score. And he’s always behaved that way with Putin. And I think he did it again in Alaska last week. And he did in Helsinki during his first administration. He always defers to Putin, even overlooking American intelligence.

[00:11:04] Jeff Schechtman: What is the appeal of Putin to him? I mean, there’s always this debate whether there is just some kind of man crush that he has on Putin. There is something that he admires about him. Or does Putin have something on him? I mean, that’s the question that comes up every time these two are together.

[00:11:23] Craig Unger: Right. Well, I don’t think they’re all mutually exclusive. And I think he genuinely admires Putin as a strong man. I mean, if you remember years ago, I forget which reporter said, “Well, you admire him? He’s a killer.” And Trump said, “You think America doesn’t do that?” I mean, Putin has killed journalists. He’s had them assassinated repeatedly. He’s had his rivals assassinated, like [Alexei] Navalny. And if you look at the difference between Trump’s first term and what’s going on now, when he got into the White House in 2017, he really didn’t know how things work. He didn’t understand the bureaucracies. He didn’t understand how to obviate all the red tape. Now he’s gone in there [and] he’s sort of just busting loose firing people left and right. And he’s put in all his own people. And they have one quality, which is loyalty to him. They have no expertise at all, again and again.

[00:12:32] Jeff Schechtman: I want to come back to where we were a few minutes ago in terms of Trump’s fascination with Putin. Yes, he admires him. Yes, he admires him as a strong man. But what else is going on in that relationship?

[00:12:45] Craig Unger: Well, there’s, you know, that Putin was a spy. He was in the KGB and as such, he knows how all that operates. And I think Trump doesn’t and that’s one of his big, big weaknesses. He doesn’t understand what intelligence really is and I think Putin has that over him, for sure. I also think he’s, you know, what he’s doing that’s so extraordinary to me is Trump is destroying the Western alliance. And, if you go all the way back to the end of World War II, 80 years ago, you know, it’s one of the great, great foreign policy achievements, I think, in all of history, is that we helped rebuild Europe. And we did it in a fairly healthy way by helping all of Western Europe develop democratic institutions, by developing strong market economies, and they became strong military allies. And Trump is throwing that away as if it’s nothing. And he’s been wanting to do that. I mean, I went back in my books, more than 40 years. And after his first trip to Moscow in 1987, Trump was telling people all over the press, and he took out ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post, saying, essentially, we should destroy the Western alliance. And that’s what Putin wants. And that’s what Trump seems to want as well.

[00:14:32] Jeff Schechtman: And yet the current situation, particularly with respect to Ukraine, has united Europe as really, it has not been united in a long time. It is having in some ways the opposite effect right now.

[00:14:45] Craig Unger: Absolutely. And I mean, it was really extraordinary to watch, I think, the leaders of seven different countries overnight, hop on a plane and get to the White House, absolutely, with one day’s notice, to sort of show their solidarity with Zelensky. And I think it was very, very important that they did do that. They’re also sort of stepping up, and you see Germany rearming, and they’re coming in to give more help to Ukraine in the absence of American support. And they did it in a rather delicate way. I think they understood Trump’s psychology, which is to say, you have to flatter him shamelessly. And this time you saw Zelensky, I think he said, thank you 10 times in one meeting. It was, he wasn’t going to get JD Vance chastising him for not saying thank you.

[00:15:48] Jeff Schechtman: Well, the question, though, is Trump is flattered by all these European leaders that jump on a plane and show up at the White House. Trump looks at that as them somehow paying homage to him. But Putin has to understand the bigger picture. Putin has to understand that he is uniting Europe in a stronger way than ever. Talk about how you think that plays out.

[00:16:11] Craig Unger: Well, that’s the big question. And I wish I knew exactly how it plays out. I don’t. I mean, what you have to see is, I mean, it depends. My view is that Putin and Russia own Trump. A lot of people saw Trump making kind remarks about Zelensky and he was somewhat critical of Putin. He brought two nuclear subs close to Russia, which would seem to be certainly a threatening gesture to Russia. He knew that Putin was angry at him because he had bombed Iran. So there seemed to be a big question of whether Trump was going to betray Vladimir Putin. And all along, I have to say, I had to think, no, he’s not going to. They own him. They own him. And he knows that. And he will march back into Putin’s camp as soon as it was possible. And that’s pretty much what you saw in Alaska. Trump came out of that meeting, you know, as if he was going to do everything Putin was asking him to do. And suddenly the Europeans flew in. So I think this is very fluid and dynamic. And it’s hard to say how it’s going to play out.

I truly welcome the new unity you see in Western Europe. And I think it’s enormously important because I truly do believe if Ukraine falls, then Putin will go on and he will try to reestablish what the empire that the former Soviet Union had. You know, and at the same time, you see, you have to wonder how strong Trump can be in terms of supporting Putin. There are Republicans who really do support Ukraine, quite apart from their support for Putin. And that’s coming into play. You also have Trump’s problems with MAGA, thanks to the whole Jeffrey Epstein affair. And if a significant chunk of MAGA abandons Trump, he will be weakened enormously. So all this is fluid. And I don’t, I’m not taking bets right now. I don’t know how it’s going to fall apart [or] play out.

[00:18:37] Jeff Schechtman: We’ll come back to Epstein in a few minutes. When you say that Putin owns Trump, what does that mean?

[00:18:47] Craig Unger: Well, I think there’s no question in my mind that they have to have some of the financial dealings that are going on. That is, I told you a bit earlier, just about those 13 Russian mobsters living or owning condos in Trump Tower. Well, the Russian mafia, it’s really important to understand, it’s very different than the Italian mafia we’re familiar with in our country, which was always at war with the FBI. The Russian mafia is not at war with the Russian intelligence. They are an arm of Russian intelligence. So any information they collected, they presumably likely shared with Russian intelligence today. And that would mean they would have the goods on Trump in some regard with that, in addition to whatever video footage they might have had of him taking, being rather careless in his intimate affairs during his visits to Moscow. And I mean, in a way, this also leads you inevitably to Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, this, you know, I think kompromat, which stands for compromising material, it’s a portmanteau of that, and it’s a Russian word. But the Russians always use it, and would not, I’d be surprised if they did not have kompromat, whether it has to do with his financial affairs or more intimate relationships when it comes to Donald Trump.

[00:20:29] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about Jeffrey Epstein and how he enters this equation with Trump and the Russian mafia and Putin. Where does Epstein fit into this puzzle?

[00:20:38] Craig Unger: Well, that’s one thing I’m trying to find out more about right now, because I think, you know, we haven’t really looked at Epstein’s financial affairs in great, great depth. I mean, there’s been some reporting on Leon Black’s relationship to Epstein. Leon Black, of course, is a multi-multi-billionaire, and he paid Epstein, I believe it was $178 million, [for] what turned out to be tax advice and advice for estate planning. Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot more than I pay my accountant. And you figure something else had to be going on there. Was that blackmail? Was it kompromat?

I also interviewed at great length a guy named John Mark Dugan, who was once a deputy sheriff in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. And when I talked to him, Dugan was kind of a bad actor. He’d been fired from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. A lot of people disliked him and said he was doing very, you know, dubious things. And he told me that he had gotten 478 videos from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department that Jeffrey Epstein had taken, presumably, of all of [the] sexual activities [he had] going on, whether it was in his Palm Beach house or his other houses was unclear. He actually showed me one of these sex tapes. And to be honest, I was not convinced that it was what he was claiming it to be. But John Mark Dugan ended up in Moscow. He showed me photos and I printed one of them in my book, American Kompromat. It shows him in Moscow with a guy named Borodin, who was one of Putin’s top aides. And this was just a couple of days after he had arrived in Moscow. And you had to wonder, this guy John Mark Dugan was really a nobody. How did he get appointments with the staff of these figures, with top Putin officials? And I mean, it looks like he’s selling kompromat. Whether that’s the case or not, I still don’t know. But he’s definitely an actor on behalf of Russia. He is putting out disinformation. And, you know, I think the whole Epstein operation in a way may have been used to get kompromat. That’s certainly possible. Again, whether it’s sex tapes or financial machinations, we don’t really know.

[00:23:43] Jeff Schechtman: Why has this been so difficult to pin down? Ten years there’s been talk about Trump and Russia and Putin, all of the things that we’ve been talking about, Craig. And yet 10 years later, there are still, at least within the polite company of the mainstream media, a sense of, well, there’s really no proof. It’s all a conspiracy. Probably didn’t really happen.

[00:24:08] Craig Unger: Right. Well, there are a lot of reasons. You know, I think one is, you know, I’ve written six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy. And [in] each one, you see the erosion of our checks and balances again and again and again. And when it comes to Trump and Epstein, one thing you see is that our regulations concerning the sale of real estate are pathetic. I mean, they are so weak that it’s a joke. That is, it is completely above board to buy real estate through anonymous limited liability corporations in which the name of the beneficial owner is obscured, so that you can buy real estate anonymously and you can do it in all-cash purchases. So if a mobster comes to your house and puts down six million dollars, by the way, that was 40 years ago and it’s the equivalent of $30 million today, that’s all good and well. And there’s suddenly no record of who owns the property thanks to the new transaction. And that is perfectly legal today. And it’s very hard to get beneath that. You know, you have a lot of countries, you know, I’m thinking of the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Channel Islands, Panama, that seem to be devoted to allowing money laundering and other financial crimes. Well, the United States is becoming just like the rest of them in a way. And Trump and his allies and the Russian gangsters have taken full advantage of that. So all of that is one reason. I mean, and I could go on and on about the weakness of our regulations.

You know, I also think the media has failed in so many different ways. And I was looking back to when I started out in journalism, and, you know, I’m an old guy, as you may know, I’m 76 years old. And when I was in college and starting out in journalism, the stories that really animated me were the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. And in each case, it was one or two or a handful of reporters who could do one story or more, maybe a series, but in so doing, they caused the entire national conversation to change. This was also a time when Americans, by and large, shared the same factual reality. That is not at all the case today. And over those last 50 years, I’ve watched that change again and again and again. I mean, I think it started to change back. You know, I just did a book on the October surprise of 1980. My most recent book was called Den of Spies. And when I started reporting that in 1991, for the first time I ran into my reporting was sort of erased by a battle for control of the narrative. That is, there were administration people close to the Bush administration that was then in power, people close to Henry Kissinger, who was also writing for Newsweek when I was there. And obviously, he had a hell of a lot more clout than I did. And those were the people who triumphed and they squashed a really, really important story that I think is a really significant part of American history concerning the 1980 presidential election.

[00:28:21] Jeff Schechtman: Given all that that Trump has done and the way the public has, particularly his public, has responded to it and the famous Trump line that “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and nobody would care.” Why would he be afraid of Putin or any material that Putin has on him?

[00:28:42] Craig Unger: That’s a good question. I mean, I, you know, my mind immediately goes to the Epstein affair, because clearly he’s also afraid of anything Ghislaine Maxwell might have on him or that might be in those Epstein documents. And I think it’s, you know, the Trump base has again and again for, gosh, it’s [been] going on for years now, referred to the Trump-Russia hoax, the Russia hoax, the Russia hoax. If Putin reveals them suddenly, I think it makes them think, well, gee, maybe it wasn’t a hoax after all. Maybe Putin really had something on him. And I think that’s what we see, a different version of that going on with the Epstein files right now, and you see Trump supporters or formerly Trump supporters like Joe Rogan, who are now starting to raise real questions about what was really going on with the Epstein and Trump.

[00:29:46] Jeff Schechtman: What do we know about any relationship between Epstein and Russian oligarchs? Anything?

[00:29:53] Craig Unger: I think there’s something there. And to be honest, I don’t like to reveal what I’m reporting on now. I have a Substack column and it’s just under my name, but I did two recent Substack columns. One was on a woman named Lana, or rather Svetlana Pozhidaeva, who worked for Jeffrey Epstein, and another was on a woman named Masha Drakova, who also worked for Epstein. She was his publicist. Pozhidaeva was sort of a hostess who would come with Epstein when he went to MIT or Harvard and was meeting with, or was meeting with Silicon Valley, the titans of Silicon Valley. And when I looked into their histories, it’s pretty clear they were Russian agents. Masha Drakova, for example, when she was 16 years old, she had been head of a group called Nashi, which was sort of the Putin youth group. It was always compared to Hitler Youth. I mean, she was the national president of it. She became known as the girl who kissed Putin. There was a Nashi rally at which Putin appeared and she ran up to him while he was on stage and kissed him. And there’s actually a documentary movie out about her called The Girl Who Kissed Putin. And now she moved to the states. She became Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist and since then has become an increasingly big presence in Silicon Valley, where she’s an angel investor and manages a fund. I believe it was $450 million, which is not bad for someone who was still in her early 20s, if I’m not mistaken.

The other woman was Lana Pozhidaeva. And if you look at her resume, she was incredibly well educated. She went to the Russian equivalent of Harvard or Stanford, really, graduated summa cum laude, and had a graduate degree. And these were the schools where she had the same academic resume you want if you are going to be in the KGB or its successors. And instead of going into the intelligence field or into foreign policy, you would have to think she was going to go into the Foreign Ministry based on her education. But instead, she did a dramatic turn and became a model working for an agency run by a man named Jean-Luc Brunel, who was a colleague and associate of Jeffrey Epstein. And what I learned in investigating this was that his model agency had two or three big name models who I’d heard of- I’m not really a great follower of the fashion industry, but I’d heard of them. And then it had 40 or 50 younger models who may have been very attractive, but they really couldn’t get work. And I started uncovering how this works. That is, they were tied in with the Russian oligarchs. So if someone like Boris Berezovsky said he was having a big party, he would call them up and say, send me 20 or 30 young girls for my party next Saturday. And what you would end up with is a few immensely wealthy middle aged men and older with girls who are as young as 15 or so, and [the girls] were fairly naive and things would happen, and that’s the way it worked. And sex trafficking grew out of that. And Jean-Luc Brunel was one of the people who sent a lot of young girls to Epstein. It was not just Ghislaine Maxwell going to shopping malls and on the wrong side of town and wooing young girls who needed some money. There were a lot of transactions between Epstein and the Russians and I would love to know more about that. And these were not the only Russians in Epstein’s world. His bodyguard was a Russian MMA participant. So there was a lot going on with Epstein and the Russians.

[00:34:51] Jeff Schechtman: And where did Trump fall into that? Trump had his own model agency at the time and was in that world as well.

[00:34:57] Craig Unger: Absolutely. And it played a key role. And, you know, one of the things I found out when Epstein was expanding his world and starting to use the Russians, he had talked to Jean-Luc Brunel about it. And Brunel forwarded the instructions to his bookkeeper. And he told her, look, we have to reimburse these scouts, the so-called model scouts who are really looking for, I guess, escorts or I mean, or maybe sex slaves since they were so young. But he said, why don’t we use exactly the same bookkeeping practices that Donald Trump did with Trump Model [Management]? And that and that was testimony under oath in the Epstein case when he was prosecuted in Palm Beach County.

[00:35:58] Jeff Schechtman: Is part of the problem with all of this, going all the way back 40 years, going back to the oligarchs and the apartments in Trump Tower, all the way to to what happened in Alaska this week, are there just so many connections, so many pieces, so diverse in terms of the interactions of all these people that it becomes more and more difficult, particularly as more time goes on and time goes by, to really understand how all of these diverse pieces fit together?

[00:36:33] Craig Unger: Oh, I think that’s a huge part of it. And I think your ordinary investigative reporter, even The New York Times and The Washington Post, isn’t used to, you know, I use timelines that go back 50 years because that’s the way you see things develop. And I mean, another big segment of this, I think, is you have a lot of rogue intelligence operatives, both from Israel and the United States. And, you know, I mean, that’s one of the reasons I go back so far and to the mid ‘70s, there was a huge crackdown on the CIA by the Church Committee. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was a tough Democrat who did a really aggressive congressional investigation on the CIA, and it ended up revealing huge numbers of CIA secrets. And the CIA had overthrown governments in Syria, in Guatemala, in Iran, of course, in the Dominican Republic, in Vietnam, and on and on. And all of this had been secret, but a lot of it came out in the Church Committee investigation. But there was a real backlash from that, or rather blowback, because roughly a thousand operatives from the operations director of the CIA were fired. And that meant you had renegade CIA agents who were out there looking for work. Similar stuff was going on in Israel, where they had a lot of rogue agents who were arms dealers and Israel wanted them around to do the arms deals. But if they got caught, Israel would say, no, no, no, we’ve never heard of these people. So a lot of that was going on.

And, you know, when you look at Jeffrey Epstein, it’s important to remember his girlfriend, of course, and partner at times had been Ghislaine Maxwell. Her father, Robert Maxwell, worked for both Russian intelligence and for Israeli intelligence. And Jeffrey Epstein was certainly seen, and as I reported in American Kompromat, he was working with Robert Maxwell. So there are real questions as to was he sort of picking up where Robert Maxwell left off or was Ghislaine running the show in a more important way than people seem to have thought. And, you know, it’s very, very interesting. Here you have Ghislaine Maxwell, and you would think the government, if it really wanted to get to the bottom of what Epstein was doing, they would have been pressing her, pressing her, pressing her. And instead, you see Todd Blanche, deputy attorney general, who just by coincidence happened to have been the personal attorney of Donald J. Trump, you see him meeting with her privately, which just never happens. That is not supposed to happen. And then after that meeting, mysteriously, she is released from a hard time prison and is redirected into Club Fed, where she has much more freedom and much better food and a much better lifestyle for a prisoner.

[00:40:04] Jeff Schechtman: Is there a chance that because of the Epstein investigation now, because of all of the things that we’ve been talking about here, that any of this is going to come to a head in any way, that suddenly there will be revelations that bring some of this together?

[00:40:21] Craig Unger: You know, I’m sort of following this every damn day. It’s sort of hard to stomach. I do think, I mean, you know, the Democrats need some help. I mean, I think you’ve got to get some of those MAGA people, and I hate to put faith in the Joe Rogan’s of the world, but you want part of MAGA to split off from Trump and really demand that the Epstein files be reopened. And maybe things like that, you know, could lead to the defection of some of the MAGA people in the House of Representatives and give the Congress back to the Democrats.

[00:41:06] Jeff Schechtman: Why do you think some of the MAGA people care about Epstein?

[00:41:10] Craig Unger: Well, it’s sort of shocking to me, I have to say. And I kind of was asking that question a lot myself. But one thing is clear, a lot of them genuinely believed that whole story about Pizzagate. And Pizzagate, to refresh memories, was the allegations that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton were doing all this pedophile stuff in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. And among other things, we know that the pizza place doesn’t have a basement. And I’ve always thought the allegations were rather off the wall. I’ve never seen any evidence to back them up. But I mean, I think a lot of the MAGA people are invested in the notion that Democrats are pedophiles. And here, I mean, it’s particularly bizarre, given how many Republicans, whether it was Dennis Hastert, I don’t know, [or] half a dozen [other] Republican sex scandals we’ve had in the last 10 years. But the Republicans seem to believe it. And now they keep forcing the issue. And Trump was egging them on during the campaign, saying, we’ve got to get to the bottom of it, I’m going to release the Epstein files. And he said that during the campaign. And they took him seriously. And, well, it hasn’t happened. So this is one of the very few times they seem to be holding him to his promises. So, you know, I don’t have a better explanation other than that Pizzagate scenario.

[00:42:58] Jeff Schechtman: And finally, Craig, certainly you’ve been investigating this for many years and written about it for many years, as we’ve talked about. To what extent are there other, what is your knowledge or sense of other investigations that are ongoing about this? Is it being given any kind of attention other than by a few people like yourself?

[00:43:21] Craig Unger: Well, there are others like me, that’s true. But, you know, I wish I had a better answer for this, but I’ve seen all our checks and balances fall by the wayside again and again and again. What I think a big problem was Biden’s administration really should have shut all this down and it didn’t. And so you had a real failure with Merrick Garland’s Justice Department. And we’ve always had the Democrats wanting to stand by norms while the Republicans weren’t, and it’s very hard to win when your opponent’s cheating and you refuse to do so. But I think the Democrats have to fight if they’re going to stand a chance of regaining power.

[00:44:15] Jeff Schechtman: Craig Unger, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today.

[00:44:18] Craig Unger: Well, thanks for having me, Jeff. I enjoyed it.

[00:44:20] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you.

[00:44:21] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.