Epstein questions (a response to Michael Tracey)

Hey guys. Just checking in as I pound through the last of this Enemy episode. There are a few parts that have been confounding me, and I’ve been struggling with how to fit them into this episode (where they belong) without derailing or over-extending the episode. I’ve been derailed myself since a very close immediate family member suddenly and unexpectedly passed away last week. But we had the memorial the other day, and my schedule will clear until I get this episode finished. From now until it’s done, I’ll be focused on it to the exclusion of other projects, work around the house, eating, showering, everything.

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I wanted to check in because it’s been a while, and you guys have been very patient with me, but also because some of you asked me to comment on a minor incident with social media poster Michael Tracey. The whole thing is a stupid distraction, and I wasn’t going to give it the time of day, but I’ll address it since some of you have questions.

Early last week, Tracey sent me an email with questions about a few claims I made about the Epstein story in my recent episode with Tucker Carlson. An immediate family member had very unexpectedly passed a day or two before, so I didn’t see the email at first. Then people who know me reached out to say Tracey was contacting them about it, and then he got my phone number and started calling me. I found the email, and wrote back to tell him I’d just lost an immediate family member and that we could discuss his questions some other time. He wrote back demanding to know when I’d answer his questions, and so, annoyed, I wrote back an said fine, if he was on a deadline or something, I’m sure whatever he writes will be fine, so just put me down for no comment, because this was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about just now. A friend got me to think better of that, so I wrote him again to say that I would reach out and answer his questions next week. On Wednesday of “next week” - in fact, the day I gave the eulogy at our loved one’s memorial - Tracey started posting sarcastically titled videos (“Where Oh Where Has Darryl Cooper Gone?,” etc.) pretending not to know where I was or what I was doing. At that point, I washed my hands of the situation. My policy has always been that I’ll talk to anyone who wants to talk about anything they want to talk about, as long as they approach me like an adult. If, on the other hand, someone comes at me looking for a bitchy internet cat fight, I mute/block and move on. I’m not some polished media operator, I’m a regular person. I grew up and live now in an environment where, if you insult another man publicly, without provocation, or get pushy after he’s told you he’s mourning an immediate family member, you’re not going to pwn3d online, you’re going to get the shit kicked out of you. I recognize that that is not an appropriate response for someone in my position, even if it is the right response in general, so my policy is to disengage and move on, and that’s what I did. I just don’t engage with people who can’t bother to conduct themselves with a modicum of class, and some slob in a wrinkled t-shirt talking shit about me on his couch doesn’t get to demand my immediate attention as if he’s Seymour Hersh chasing down a major Pentagon scandal.

But, like I said, a few of you have asked me to comment on the specific questions, and my respect for you outweighs my lack of it for Tracey. I’m not going to watch his interviews or be one of the few people who reads his Substack posts, and I don’t want to spend any more time on this than necessary, so I’ll stick to the pertinent questions he sent to my email (which I finally read yesterday).

I have to be honest, I expected a lot more. I won’t speculate about why Tracey has now dedicated weeks of his life to running cover for alleged pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and the Israeli government official recently caught soliciting sex from a minor in Las Vegas, but I at least expected that he’d found some serious holes in my story. As I mentioned in the Provoked episode Scott Horton and I recorded two hours before the Tucker interview, I was running on 40 hours without a wink of sleep (air travel issues), and wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that I misspoke or mixed some things up. As you heard in my interview with Ryan Dawson, when he corrected me regarding the question of whether Donald Barr had hired Epstein to his first job, I not only admitted my ignorance of the facts he presented, but highlighted it and thanked him for the correction. I don’t mind being wrong and learning new things. So I was disappointed to find that Tracey’s objections were nitpicky at best, and outright deceptive or ignorant at worst.

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I’ll start with the gotcha he seems most proud of, namely, that I stated in the Tucker interview that, in February 2019, federal judge Kenneth A. Marra ruled that federal prosecutors had engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team to violate the rights of Epstein’s victims during the 2000s investigation that led to his initial arrest and conviction. Tracey pointed out that the word “conspire” does not appear in the judge’s ruling, and accused me of inventing the quote to twist the story in my preferred direction. He’s right, the judge did not use the word “conspire,” he merely ruled that that federal prosecutors had secretly colluded with Epstein’s legal team to conceal the details of Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement from his victims, in violation of the law and the victims’ rights. In sexual assault cases, prosecutors are required to inform victims of any preferential agreement with the accused, so that they can exercise their right to object to the agreement. It takes a lot of guts for a young girl to come out against an abuser, especially a billionaire whose walls are adorned with pictures of him cavorting with the rich and powerful. The law is designed so that victims who muster the courage to speak out are not surprised one day when they pass their abuser on the street, because the victim wasn’t informed that he’d cut a deal with the government. Federal prosecutors not only failed to inform the victims that they’d cut a deal with Epstein, they deceived and actively hid it from them at the request of Epstein’s legal team. Tracey says “Marra never accused the federal government of ‘conspiring’ with Jeffrey Epstein,” but leaves out what he did say:

Epstein’s counsel was aware that the Office was deliberately keeping the non-prosecution agreement (NPA) secret from the victims, and indeed, had sought assurances to that effect. After the NPA was signed, Epstein’s counsel and the Office began negotiations about whether the victims would be told about the NPA. It was a deviation from the government’s standard practice to negotiate with defense counsel about the extent of crime victims notifications.

So, I should have been more precise in my wording. The judge did not say they “conspired,” but merely that they secretly agreed to violate the law to deprive the victims of their rights. I want to be very clear here. This was not an oversight, and it did not happen by accident. The government broke the law and violated the victims’ rights as part of a secret agreement with Epstein’s lawyers, and actively deceived the victims about it. As Judge Marra wrote:

When the Government gives information to victims, it cannot be misleading. While the Government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the NPA with Epstein’s attorneys, scant information was shared with victims. Instead, the victims were told to be ‘patient’ while the investigation proceeded.

The non-prosecution agreement, you’ll recall, did not only cover crimes committed by Epstein. It committed the government to a promise not to prosecute anyone else involved in Epstein’s crimes, including any perpetrators or crimes that might be discovered later. Several victims had claimed to have been trafficked to others by Epstein, and rather than inform them that those other abusers had been given blanket immunity, the government told the victims to be “patient,” deliberately giving them the impression that the case was still being investigated, when in fact the deal had already been made.

I thought, this can’t be the best Tracey’s got. Surely, he is not hounding me, after I told him I was mourning an immediate family member, over the distinction between conspiring to violate the law and secretly colluding to violate the law? But it was. The rest of the questions were either related to this, or else were more nitpicking about wording. For example, I apparently said that Judge Marra’s 2019 ruling invalidated the 2007 non-prosecution agreement. I’m not a lawyer, and that wasn’t exactly right. It did not, by itself, invalidate the earlier deal, it merely said that the deal was made under illegal circumstances and got the ball rolling on its invalidation. That is why, just five months after Judge Marra’s ruling, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed new charges against Epstein, some of which were the exact same charges brought in 2007, which had stayed on the shelf until 2019 because they’d previously been covered under the non-prosecution agreement.

Tracey’s next objection is a fair one, but we simply disagree on the interpretation. Tracey wrote, “The only time Alex Acosta was ever asked directly about Epstein being an intelligence asset, he said ‘the answer is no.’” The first thing to point out is that Tracey is wrong - that was not the only time Acosta had been asked that question. During a news conference after Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Acosta was asked the same question. That’s a pretty easy “no,” if the answer is no, but here’s what a smirking Acosta said:

So, so there has been reported to that effect, and, and let me say, um, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects in this case, uh, not just now, but over the years, and, and again, I would, you know, I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact. This was a case that was brought by our office based on the facts. And I, I look at that reporting and others, and I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines, um, but I can tell you that a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes.

Um, OK? What would you think if you confronted your spouse after someone told you they’d been cheating, and instead of simply denying it, they hemmed and hawed and said, “So, so I… I’ve also heard things to that effect. I’ve heard a lot of things to a lot of effects. So many effects. And, I, you know, I would hesitate to necessarily take those things as fact. I can’t answer your question directly because of, um, guidelines, or something, but, um, but a lot of the things being said are just going down rabbit holes.”

In the example Tracey brought up, Acosta was not at a press conference, but across the table from an Inspector General investigating his handling of the case. Tracey relates the exchange accurately, noting that Acosta was asked if he had knowledge, at the time the deal was made, that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset, and that Acosta replied, “The answer is no.” Tracey thinks this means Acosta denied that Epstein was an intelligence asset, and that’s fine, it’s a fair interpretation if made in good faith, but I disagree. Understand that this is not an informal discussion. Acosta is under oath facing potential perjury charges (at a time when Democrats and their allies at the FBI & DOJ are actively hammering any Trump associates they can manage to trip up), and his lawyers are sitting right next to him, advising him on every answer to ensure they’re worded in a way to protect him from intentional or unintentional misinterpretation. Vicki Ward had reported that during Acosta’s vetting process prior to his appointment as Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Acosta had told interviewers that he’d been told to back off because Epstein belonged to intelligence. The Inspector General asked Acosta whether he had knowledge that Epstein was an intelligence asset, not whether he was told Epstein was an intelligence asset. The answer, under penalty of perjury, to whether he had knowledge of it, is no, because being told something is not the same as having knowledge of it. If police ask whether you have knowledge that someone had committed a crime, and you answer ‘yes’ because someone else told you they’d committed one, you would be speaking falsely, because you do not have knowledge of it, you have what amounts to hearsay. Acosta was not asked whether he was told Epstein belonged to intelligence, as Ward’s reporting insisted, but whether he had personal knowledge of it, and under the supervision and guidance of his lawyers, he truthfully answered ‘no.’ You might be asking why, if he really had been told Epstein belonged to intelligence, he didn’t just say, “Well, Mr. Inspector General, no, I don’t have personal knowledge of that, I was told by my bosses that he was an asset.” The answer is, when you are under oath and start wandering off the reservation answering questions that haven’t been asked, you open yourself up to new lines of questioning - “Who was your boss at the time?” “Well, here’s what he said, are you saying he’s lying?” - and any halfway decent lawyer is going to smash the button on your shock collar until you shut your mouth. You answer direct questions as accurately and concisely as possible so that your words cannot be brought back to haunt you at a later time. A former federal prosecutor, flanked by high-powered lawyers, answering questions under oath in a hostile political environment, would know that better than anyone. And look, the answer to whether Ward’s reporting about what Acosta said is true might be ‘no,’ but that’s not what he was asked, and it’s not what he answered.

I’ve already wasted enough of our time responding to someone I consider to be a classless, bad-faith actor, but the final objection is Tracey’s most egregious, and exposes him as someone who is either a liar or someone who hasn’t been following the case very closely. Tracey says that, under Acosta’s direction, federal prosecutors at the Southern District of Florida intervened in the Epstein case because they saw that Florida state prosecutors were mishandling it. In other words, the federal officials that gave Epstein and everyone associated with him blanket immunity for all crimes they may have committed, including ones yet to be discovered, and then deceived the victims about it in violation of the law, are the real heroes of the story. This is just factually wrong, and you don’t have to pore through obscure legal documents to know it. You can just watch the Netflix documentary series about Epstein, and you get it straight from the horse’s mouth. The feds did not proactively decide to intervene, the case was brought to them by the chief of the Palm Beach police department because he had lost trust in the state prosecutors handling it. The PBPD referred the case to the FBI and gave them what they had. The FBI identified at least 20 underage victims, and brought the case to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where Assistant US Attorney Maria Villafaña picked it up. After months of investigation, Villafaña drew up a 60 count indictment against Epstein. Epstein’s lawyers then actively sought out Alex Acosta, and only then did he take an active part in the case. Villafaña saw the writing on the wall, and complained in an email to her superiors that she feared their office was “going down the same path that the State Attorney’s office had gone down.” She was rebuked for not knowing her place, and told that decisions were being made above her paygrade, and was threatened with professional consequences if she did not back down:

Both the tone and substance of your email are totally inappropriate… If the U.S. Attorney [Acosta] or the First Assistant [Sloman] desire to meet with you, they will let you know. Nor will I direct Epstein’s lawyers to communicate only with you… If you want to work major cases in the district you must understand and accept the fact that there is a chain of command — something you disregard with great regularity.

This was a major case for Villafaña, and one that was vividly present in her memory. She had spent months investigating it, and had dozens of on-the-record underage victims, but lawyers of the accused billionaire managed to go over her head and cut a deal with her bosses. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with a young prosecutor, and the memories were still raw years later, when she told the Office of Professional Responsibility of the experience. When Acosta was asked about these events, he claimed he couldn’t recall any of the details, but it’s all right there in the OPR report and the cited email chains, as well as in testimony from Villafaña and others.

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That’s all the time I’m going to devote to it. I already knew Tracey was a low-class, tactless dirtbag, but I expected him to put a little more work into his “journalism” than this. From now on, I’m not doing anything but the next history episode, and, to be honest, it’ll be the same after that. I’m tired of politics, and of all this bad-faith, vulgar bickering. I’m tired of the nastiness, the hostility, the vulgarity. I’m tired of having to be exposed to people like Michael Tracey. I’ve let these people distract me way too much this year, but I’m done letting them drag me off course. The next time you hear from me will be with a post releasing the next episode of Enemy, and Michael, because I know a narcissist has to read every word written about him, the next time you hear from me will be… never.