The most important thing in the Epstein files
Kait Justice: It’s about Deutsche Bank
Before we get into the most important thing I’ve learned about Epstein in years, let’s take a second to enjoy the work of Mariel Colón Miró: ranchera musician, El Chapo family attorney, and witness to Jeffrey Epstein’s final will and testament. A few quick updates:
There have been reports lately about a DEA investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and the suggestion he had some role in the global drug trade. This triggered a favorite fact: one of the attorneys who witnessed Epstein’s final will and testament, while visiting him in prison, was El Chapo’s attorney. Mariel Colón Miró visited Epstein “nearly every business day” he was at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, according to visitor logs unearthed by The New York Times. She was 26 at the time, and joined Epstein’s fold after being a key member of El Chapo’s legal team at his 2019 trial in Brooklyn. She’s still close to the Guzmán family, and represents both El Chapo’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, and El Chapo’s estate in various appeals. Also: Mariel Colón Miró recently launched a music career.
Jeffrey Epstein’s personal attorney Darren Indyke just spoke to the House Oversight Committee. When Indyke said “I had no knowledge whatsoever of Mr. Epstein’s wrongdoings,” two things ran through my mind. The first is this report, explaining that Indyke had power of attorney over Epstein’s Deutsche Bank account and in 2017 (well after Epstein had been convicted of bad things) routinely used it to withdraw $7,500 in cash. As he did so, Indyke reportedly checked with the teller to confirm that the transaction would not trigger a “currency transaction report” to the government. The second thing on my mind about Indyke is that Epstein’s former business partner Steve Hoffenberg told me a) this is the biggest crime in the history of the world, and b) “Darren Indyke knows everything.”
Russell Simmons lived his life in such a way that his Wikipedia entry has numbered lists of the women and children who say he assaulted or raped them. (A key case involves known Epstein associate Brett Ratner.) Now let me tell you about Celtics investor Jim Breyer, who pops up in umpteen crazy ways through all the deep billionaire research I have done, especially as a lynchpin of Russian money flowing into the U.S. But what I only learned recently is that Breyer and Simmons were once partners in a business, unfortunately called GlobalGrind.com, that attempted to capitalize on Simmons as a cultural leader and inspiration to young people.
Now, onto the main event: Kait Justice has found the most important thing in the Epstein files:
Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon plotted and scripted Donald Trump’s resignation from the oval office, to take place in the summer of 2019.
Two men with deep Trump knowledge predicted he’d resign mid-term as the result of a judge in New York had ordered the release of Trump’s Deutsche Bank files.
Epstein had many ways to take down Trump. He told Bannon as much. Michael Wolff says Epstein showed him compromising photos of Trump with topless “young girls” that Epstein kept in a safe.
But it was the Deutsche Bank files that, in the views of two men who knew Trump well, would bring him down.
Through all the endless fog of this story, that’s clarifying. Those files are the focus. That’s what we need. That is the heart of the matter.
As Epstein and Bannon were texting about Trump’s demise, they imagined a clock ticking. The judge had given until late July 2019 for the files to be produced. Epstein discussed “helicopter on lawn.” That’s how Nixon resigned, and how Epstein imagined Trump would leave in the middle of his presidency.
Bannon suggested that would happen August 15.
But …
Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport on July 6, and died on August 10.
Wow.
And: The helicopter didn’t whisk the President away. Instead, Trump’s attorneys worked magic, eventually before the Supreme Court, and the relevant Deutsche Bank files have still never been produced.
Before I even finished reading her story I paid $80 to support Kait Justice’s Downwind of Truth. I texted the story to David Thorpe; he also paid his $80. This is the journalism I want to support.
In an earlier story, Justice did something else brilliant, by illuminating an exchange Epstein had with Andrew Farkas, where Epstein played banker.
When a company needs to raise a large amount of capital, it hires an investment bank like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. Think of them as the matchmakers of the financial world. For that service, the most prestigious investment banks on earth charge between 1.5 and 2 percent of the capital they place. If you are raising $1 billion, you pay Goldman Sachs $15 to $20 million, and for that price you get the full resources of one of the most powerful financial institutions ever created, with offices in every major capital, relationships with every sovereign wealth fund, and a compliance department that ensures everything is documented and legal.
Epstein was charging approximately 7.5 percent. Three to five times the Goldman Sachs rate.
This is a big idea: Epstein ran a special bank, with access to special kinds of money, for special purposes. And it was hella expensive. And often the money was stashed at Deutsche, often with the same banker.
We launched TrueHoop on Substack on February 20, 2019. The very first announcement post included the name “Rosemary Vrablic” because at that time we were investigating oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, and Deutsche Bank was an essential part of the offshoring of Russian billions.
That Prokhorov investigation bled straight into Epstein, with themes and people who weren’t just similar, but identical. When I went to the secretive invitation—only basement meeting of PutinCon to learn more about the ways of oligarchs, I stood in a long security line talking to a woman who told me that a lot of crime ran through Deutsche Bank, which she knew because for a long time she worked there.
I’ve learned that literal trillions move through various kinds of bank trickery brilliantly described in Oliver Bullough’s book Moneyland. That ball of money might include drug money, oil money, arms money, intelligence money, and especially the proceeds of corruption and looting by kleptocrats. The trend is that money comes from unstable places, and seeks stability. Assets gained by selling cocaine, siphoning money from the Russian government, or illegal arms deals can be seized on a whim close to home; those billions are safer under someone else’s name in a place with a strong rule of law.
Robert Maxwell could make that happen. Michael Milken could make that happen. Jeffrey Epstein could make that happen … with the delightful security of having many of the key people—bankers, politicians, lawyers—guaranteed neither to steal your stuff nor blow the whistle, because Epstein has video in his safe that could end their careers. His network also features a ton of people with intelligence connections.
That’s my current theory of the case: that Epstein’s special bank charged so much because it was a club with many powerful members, all of whom were, and still are, deeply incentivized to protect the club.
Justice writes:
One month after Epstein’s death, on September 16, 2019, SDNY prosecutor emails show attorneys discussing whether to merge the Epstein financial investigation with a pre-existing Kushner and Deutsche Bank investigation, referencing “the DB part of Epstein case (or the Epstein part of DB)” and recognizing that the Epstein and Kushner banking relationships were entangled in the same Deutsche Bank compliance infrastructure. That merger never happened, and there is no public record of who made that decision, when it was made, or what the reasoning was.
Three months after Epstein’s death, on November 19, 2019, Thomas Bowers was found dead at his Malibu residence, with the medical examiner ruling the death a suicide by hanging. Bowers had led Deutsche Bank’s U.S. Private Wealth Management division, the division where Rosemary Vrablic worked as Trump and Kushner’s personal banker, the division that opened more than forty accounts for Epstein in 2013, and the division where compliance officers had prepared suspicious activity reports on Trump and Kushner accounts that senior management blocked from being filed. According to investigative journalist Scott Stedman, federal investigators had been asking about Bowers and documents he might have possessed, and a source described him as “the gatekeeper for financial documents for the bank’s wealthiest customers.”
Again: wow.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is currently refusing to turn the critical Deutsche files over to Congress. (Kait Justice has theories as to why.) It’s worth reading this whole letter from Senator Ron Wyden, who is determined to get them.
Rosemary Vrablic has the answers we need.
We’re not hopeless without her, though. We have a place to start: The Department of Justice has assembled a trove of internal Deutsche documents, some of which are discoverable in the Epstein files. For example, here’s a list of clients Deutsche intended to invite to the 2014 opening night Metropolitan Opera performance of “The Marriage of Figaro.” The names include Michael Milken, Blazers billionaire Paul Allen (who died in 2018), and Russian-Israeli oligarch Victor Vekselberg.
And there’s a 2014 list of Deutsche Bank’s top wealth management clients by revenue, which I turned into the table below, with notes:
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Continuing to put out amazing, in-depth, breathtaking reporting, Henry. THANK YOU!