[2025 UPDATE] From JFK To Jeffrey Epstein

Prologue: “The Unresolved Major Event”

It was six years ago today when the feds disclosed that the financier Jeffrey Epstein attempted suicide in custody — and failed.

Remember that?

Whatever’s going on with the Epstein saga this week is so hot to handle that yesterday House Speaker Mike Johnson announced he’d send members home early for their summer break — to avert any votes on measures related to Epstein disclosure.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

On the day before the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination in 2023, we published an issue with the title “From JFK to Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Thanks for putting into words what I've long known but didn't have the words for,” said one reader. “Much appreciation.”

November 22, 1963 marks the day when Americans’ trust in “the system” first began to erode — when the heady post-WWII sense that life would keep getting better and better took its first major blow.

“The unresolved major event is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides with the collapse of America's constitutional government and the decline of its culture,” wrote the veteran Washington journalist Sam Smith more than a decade ago.

“Beginning with the Kennedy assassination, the number of inadequately explained major events has been mounting steadily, and with them a steady decline in the trust between the people and their government.”

We also said you could draw a through line from JFK’s assassination to Epstein’s death in custody in 2019.

In both cases, you could believe the official story — and still find cause for outrage.

The available facts alone — along with the lack of transparency and disclosure — were a devastating indictment of the system.

As I said several times throughout that issue, “It is not a system worth preserving and it is not a system worth fighting for.”

Much has taken place on both the JFK and the Epstein fronts in recent months. It’s time for a follow-up…

Epstein: What About the Videos?

The best place to start with Epstein is with a reminder of what has not changed since our original writeup.

At the time of his death on Aug. 10, 2019, Epstein was 1) a known suicide risk based on the July 23 attempt and 2) a potential witness to monstrous crimes by other people in high places.

After July 23, 2019, Attorney General William Barr had one job — to make sure Jeffrey Epstein stayed alive.

The day after the news broke that Epstein was dead, I wrote that Barr should resign in disgrace.

The fact he did not — and that he sauntered back to his lucrative private law career in D.C. once Donald Trump’s first term was over — speaks volumes about “accountability” in America’s power structures.

And it goes a long way to explain what’s happened — and what’s not happened — in the last six years, and the last six months.

Perhaps the most significant Epstein development between 2019 and 2024 was a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase.

Epstein’s private island, purchased in 1998, was called Little Saint James — located southeast of Saint Thomas.

We took note of shocking pretrial documents filed two summers ago: The Virgin Islands government asserted that JPM not only “turned a blind eye” to Epstein’s activities but that it “actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006–2019.”

Which is even more shocking than it sounds, because JPM supposedly dumped Epstein as a client in 2013.

The documents also allege JPM facilitated Epstein’s withdrawals of physical cash — far beyond the $10,000 threshold that banks are required to report to the U.S. Treasury — “while also being aware that Epstein paid his underage sexual assault victims in cash.”

Alas, the Virgin Islands government agreed to settle the case for a $75 million payment from JPM — about 0.18% of the bank’s revenue the previous quarter.

Here’s a plot twist we overlooked at the time: The settlement came after Virgin Islands Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. fired the attorney general who’d brought the case and named a replacement.

And in a you-can’t-make-this stuff up development: Last year, Gov. Bryan appointed still another attorney general who once served as a lawyer for the Epstein estate. For real.

Meanwhile, anyone surprised by the lack of Epstein revelations here in Trump’s second term hasn’t been paying attention.

In an interim update we published last fall, we took note of a Fox News interview in which Trump was already signaling there would be something less than full disclosure: “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

That said, a large number of Trump confidants, advocates and hangers-on spent 2024 and early 2025 raising expectations anyway…

Fast-forward to this month — and the memo released by the Justice Department and the FBI on Monday, July 7.

You likely know the broad outlines. The Axios site summed them up like so: "President Trump's Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a 'client list' or was murdered."

The memo further said that no “third parties” would be charged in relation to Epstein’s crimes beyond his enabler Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in 2022 on charges she recruited and trafficked four teenage girls for Epstein.

By and large, the mainstream was beside itself with joy…

“This twisted tale,” clucked The New York Times, “has raised fundamental questions about the limits of Mr. Trump’s abilities to control the conspiratorial forces he has plied in his pursuit of the presidency.”

Within days, we were treated to the spectacle of a presidential “crashout” both on social media and during White House press availabilities — a foul-mouthed Trump calling out his own supporters, saying they’d fallen for a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.

As for the reaction among Trump supporters…

Some of them were ready to let the whole thing go — too ready. One might say they were eager to obediently take their cue from the president. Move along, nothing to see here…

As for the Trump supporters who weren’t willing to let go, a lot of them got caught up in semantics — especially Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement earlier this year that she was in possession of an Epstein “client list.”

On that score, Bondi probably deserves the benefit of the doubt. How likely is it Epstein would have kept a “client list” anyway? She likely was referring to a broader cache of Epstein files.

But there were other things Bondi said earlier this year where she does not deserve a pass. For example…

The videos. We’ve known about them for years. In our original 2023 write-up we cited journalist Vicky Ward, who wrote the first in-depth expose of Epstein for Vanity Fair in the early 2000s.

“During my reporting on this case,” she wrote, “I heard time and time again that Epstein recorded the powerful people who came into his orbit… What happened to that video footage remains one of the biggest questions of this case: Where is it?”

Nowhere, we’re supposed to believe now. Whatever footage of underage girls that was in Epstein’s possession was recorded by other people, and Epstein downloaded it from the dark web or whatever. OK…

And then there was Bondi’s statement in the spring that documents would be released — but they might be redacted on grounds of “national security.”

Tweeted Darryl Cooper, the man behind the extraordinary MartyrMade history podcasts: “Or here’s an idea, how about you tell us WTF a known human trafficker and pedophile has to do with our national security??”

Or is it another nation’s security?

To date, there’s no smoking-gun evidence that Epstein was an Israeli spy — luring the rich and powerful to compromise themselves with underage girls.

But it is telling that while Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino have gone out of their way to assert that Epstein killed himself and there were no other sex-trafficking perps besides Epstein and Maxwell…

… they’ve also gone out of their way to avoid the question of whether Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”

That’s the expression attributed to Alex Acosta, the Justice Department official who gave Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2008.

You can almost see the outlines of where the story might go from here.

The mainstream as well as the bulk of Trump loyalists will spend decades asserting that Epstein killed himself and his only collaborator was Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maybe in another 10–15 years, Oliver Stone’s filmmaker son Sean will put out a movie pushing back against the “nothing to see here” narrative… and it’ll take another 30 years beyond that for dogged investigators to say they finally have the evidence that the official story is a tissue of lies.

Because that’s basically where we are now with JFK, six decades after his murder. Read on…

JFK and the CIA: Three Liars

The CIA’s counterintelligence division was “responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”

So concluded the veteran journalist Jefferson Morley this spring.

Morley is no alt-media fringe figure. He worked at The Washington Post for 15 years.

He’s spent most of this century suing the CIA for access to documents related to JFK’s murder — not to prove any pet theories about what “really” happened but because he believes you and I as American citizens deserve to know the whole truth, whatever it might be.

We won’t rehash the sorry history of the cover-up today — how Donald Trump caved on the release of documents that by law should have been released in 2017, or how Joe Biden signed a late-night executive order in 2023 basically entrusting the entire historical record to the CIA.

Trump did order the remaining JFK files to be released at the start of his second term. The CIA is still holding back on some disclosures, rule of law be damned.

The releases this spring are enough to implicate the CIA — based on known lies by three CIA officials.

Morley laid out his case last April before the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

For him, the picture began to emerge with the 2023 release of the CIA’s pre-assassination record on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Far from being a “lone nut,” Oswald had been on the CIA’s radar for four years before the JFK assassination — long enough for the agency to compile a 198-page file on him during that time.

But only with this year’s releases did the full picture come into focus. Morley says these revelations demonstrate beyond all doubt that three CIA officials lied about Oswald, his relationship to the agency and what the agency knew about him:

• Richard Helms, deputy CIA director at the time of JFK’s murder, later CIA director from 1966–1973. He testified to the Warren Commission in May 1964, saying the agency had only “minimal” knowledge of Oswald before the murder. But the declassified Oswald file — again, 198 pages long! — shows Oswald was on the CIA’s radar starting in 1959

• James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief from 1954–1975. Angleton testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 — professing he knew nothing about the agency intercepting Oswald’s mail. This year’s releases demonstrate Angleton personally ordered mail surveillance of Oswald in November 1959 — and received a full report about Oswald’s correspondence in July 1962

• George Joannides, chief of covert operations at the CIA’s Miami station in 1963. For a long time, the CIA denied Joannides even existed. By 1978, he testified to the same House committee Angleton did. Joannides denied knowing who ran a program code-named AMSPELL — which funded a Cuban student group that locked horns with Oswald (who was partial to Cuba’s strongman Fidel Castro). In reality, Joannides ran the program himself.

The CIA still hasn’t released all of Joannides’ personnel file. But we now know he won a CIA medal for stonewalling the investigation.

“Three makes a pattern, a pattern of malfeasance, of institutional misconduct,” said Morley in his House testimony last April.

“If three police officers lie about the defendant in a homicide case, that cannot be called evidence of incompetence. To the contrary, such deception indicates guilty knowledge and legal culpability, either individually and institutionally.

“The new JFK fact pattern leads to a new conclusion. We now know what they knew and when they knew it. We now know that Helms, Angleton, and Joannides were responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”

No, there’s still no smoking-gun evidence that Allen Dulles — the CIA director fired by JFK — engineered the assassination because he and his cronies feared that the president wanted to wind down the Cold War with the Soviet Union, ending the gravy train for the military-industrial complex.

But that’s not what Morley is trying to prove. He’s just looking at the available facts and seeing where they lead.

“Those of us who have exposed the CIA’s cover story that George Joannides did not exist in 1963 are no longer obliged to concoct conspiracy theories to explain the Agency’s false statements about Lee Harvey Oswald,” Morley writes at his Substack page.

“Those false statements are now a matter of record. It’s up to the defenders of the CIA and the official story of a ‘lone gunman’ to explain the malfeasance that has been revealed.”

The COVID Betrayal

Our original 2023 write-up had a section about the COVID betrayal. Coming seven months after Epstein’s death, it too was a breathtaking demonstration of governmental impunity.

I won’t dwell on it today. Suffice to say that while Dr. Anthony Fauci got a last-minute pardon from Joe Biden… other figures behind the lockdowns, restrictions and mandates did not.

That includes Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator — who’s now CEO of a privately held biotech firm.

Where are the investigations, much less the prosecutions? Where’s the transparency? Where’s the accountability?

At the very least, the Trump administration could stop giving Pfizer and Moderna protection against lawsuits.

As Bloomberg Law reported last December, “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is extending through 2029 liability protections for those producing and administering COVID-19 vaccines.”

How convenient as the number of cancers and cardiovascular issues continues to grow — a jump that coincided with the jabs’ introduction in late 2020. (Yes, correlation does not equal causation, but the correlation is worth investigating, no?)

If this was an executive-branch decision by the Biden administration, it can be easily reversed by the Trump administration. But it has not.

Looking back to 2020, “They murdered your loved ones,” sums up a recent tweet by Dr. Andrew Zywiec of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. “They locked you down like dogs, and told you where and when you could shop, pray and eat.

“They did so with a smile. They enjoyed it. To this day, they wouldn’t change a thing. They will never apologize, because they don’t think they did anything wrong.”

The Streisand Effect

And so, six decades since JFK was gunned down, Gen Xers who weren’t even alive then — but who do remember Schoolhouse Rock! — cynically exchange memes like these…

As one commenter writes on the alt-right social media site Gab, “How many young boys died in Iraq because Epstein had dirt on a senator?

“How many billions of dollars were funneled away from our deeply indebted country to another country because a congressman preferred the sexual pleasure of an underage girl? How many homeless veterans sleep on the streets while billion-dollar weapons systems go to Ukraine thanks to the… proclivities of a senior official? How many working-class homes have been foreclosed upon because a Federal Reserve governor was naughty and someone wanted to short the market?”

We don’t know. But at the same time, says precious metals expert Don Durrett on X, “We know they're lying. They know they're lying. They know that we know they're lying. But they don't care. It all started in 1963 and has been an ongoing cover-up ever since.”

That said, the ham-fisted approach to the Epstein affair is giving rise to the “Streisand effect”: The more “they” try to tamp it all down, the more everyday folks sit up and take notice.

“The way they’re responding to all this and handling it is a beautiful gift,” says the aforementioned Darryl Cooper — speaking on the new podcast Provoked with my acquaintance Scott Horton from the Libertarian Institute.

“Because you know what? We can never let this story die. Even if we get no more information, no more anything, we can never let this story die because 50 years from now, when young people are coming up and starting to get political and starting to look at the U.S. government, this is going to be an entry point for them to understand the nature of the institution that they’re interacting with.

“And it will always be that. And that is a good thing, ultimately.”

Best regards,

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets

P.S. The big market story today is a trade deal with Japan. Wall Street likes it. The S&P 500 is up three-quarters of a percent. At 6,355 it will likely notch another record close today.

And yet, something about the deal doesn’t add up. As hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian tweets, Japanese cars will be subject to a 15% tariff while “Ford, GM, Tesla, and all the other American manufacturers are going to be paying 50% more for their steel, 50% more for their copper, 25% more for their Canadian production, 25% more for their Mexican production, and 55% on their Chinese production.”

Meanwhile, gold has sunk back below $3,400 — but silver continues to hold the line on $39. Crude goes for $65.19, about the lowest all month. Bitcoin hovers a little over $118,000.

P.P.S. This just happened as we’re about to hit “send.” File it under “Foregone Conclusions.”