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Ellie Leonard finished reading every page. Eighteen hundred of them. Five hundred and thirty-three documented email exchanges between Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein across nine years and six months, ending forty-four days before the FBI arrested Epstein at Teterboro. The picture she came back with is not a writer and a subject. It is a service agreement hiding in plain sight. Like most of Narativ’s content, this special report is available to everyone for free. If you’d like to get more content like this sign up below, or become a paid subscriber and support our independent journalism. Leonard and Lev Parnas joined Narativ Live tonight for a special report on what the emails actually show. The friendship did not begin in 2009 with a casual note to Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Wolff flew on Epstein’s plane to a TED conference as early as 2001. In 2003 Wolff tried to facilitate the sale of New York Magazine to a consortium that included Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Donnie Deutsch. The paper record picks up in 2009, goes silent for a year, then comes roaring back in February 2011 with Wolff writing, “Have been defending you to the world’s press.” That email is the moment the relationship becomes commercial. “He is now being paid by Jeffrey Epstein for a PR operation, a reputation cleanup of Jeffrey Epstein,” Shalev said. “Their friendship is not really a ‘friendship’. It’s a service agreement between a client and a PR guy that was masquerading in front of everybody else as a friendship and as an author-subject relationship.” Leonard catalogued the mechanics. Wolff worked with British PR operative Ian Osborne and five other publicists over the course of the correspondence. An Osborne and Partners memo recovered in the files lays it out in bullet points: “clean up Google,” retain search engine optimization firms, hire “Israeli experts” to scrub the internet, target a specific list of journalists — Gerald Baker, Lionel Barber, Andrew Sorkin, John Micklethwaite, Josh Tyrangiel — who between them ran the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times DealBook, and Bloomberg Businessweek. The Gates Foundation relationship was the planned vehicle for rehabilitation. When Virginia Giuffre named Prince Andrew in January 2015, Wolff drafted a seven-thousand-word New York Magazine feature built around the Gates angle. Epstein’s lawyers killed it. Wolff kept working. He did not believe Giuffre. He defended Prince Andrew. He treated the #MeToo movement, in Leonard’s words, as “absolute bunk” while simultaneously finding graduate-student assistants for Epstein to hire. On October 22, 2017, Wolff brokered the first meeting between Epstein and Steve Bannon at the Gramercy Park Hotel. By January 2018 Fire and Fury was the number one book in America and Epstein was hosting a theatrical “Fire and Fury birthday party” for himself with Bannon, Tom Barrack, Woody Allen and Obama’s former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler in the room. By February 2019, Wolff was forwarding early drafts of Siege to Epstein for editing. “Epstein was editing, helping him write and edit his books too,” Leonard said. “The Trump books, they were editing Trump’s book together.” The hundred hours of recorded interviews Wolff has been selling on Substack as his insider archive are not journalism. They are the raw material of a nine-year fixer operation. Wolff himself told Epstein in writing that he used the existence of the tapes as leverage — if a source refused to cooperate, “remind them that I have these tapes and I have these interviews.” Parnas flagged the part that does not sit right. Donald Trump has not sued Michael Wolff. He does not treat Wolff the way he treats other reporters who claim to have evidence against him. “The relationship, there’s something about it that doesn’t smell right,” Parnas said. “Wolff talks about Donald Trump. I have the goods on Trump. Trump is everything, but he never produces it.” If Wolff sold Epstein a liberal-media-guy-who-understands-you reputation fix, the question is whether he sold Trump the same package. The pattern in the emails — saying one thing to Epstein and the opposite to Bannon, saying one thing publicly and the reverse behind closed doors — does not rule it out. History rhymes. Narativ wrote on March 30 that Wolff was Epstein’s fixer (narativ.substack.com/p/michael-wolff-was-epsteins-fixer), working from the first pass through the files and Leonard’s early transcription. Tonight’s show is the full receipt. The cross-reference map of all 533 exchanges, the eight chapters of the friendship, the peak months that line up exactly with Epstein’s legal crises — it all sits in a single fact sheet now. What looked like a prolific journalist covering the powerful was a paid reputation manager working inside Epstein’s defense for the entire decade Wolff was also writing America’s definitive books about Donald Trump. Thank you to Ellie Leonard and Lev Parnas. Leonard writes The Panicked Writer on Substack and is continuing the Hilton Head investigation. Parnas is a Narativ regular and a congressional candidate who lived inside Trump’s orbit during the years Fire and Fury and Siege were being written. The Wolfpack — the viewers crowdsourcing this investigation in real time — earned their name tonight. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner. Narativ Live is a production of narativ.org. Subscribe for breaking news alerts, the weekly video podcast in HD, and email notifications of live broadcasts. Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Rolf Kvalvik, Robin Payes, Elaine Cimino, Yvonne Evans, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org Donald Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning that an extension of the Iran ceasefire was “highly unlikely.” By three this afternoon he had posted to Truth Social that he was extending it after all, citing a “seriously fractured” Iranian government. Between those two statements, Iranian negotiators refused to meet with the American peace envoy in Pakistan. Their reason, repeatedly reported and acknowledged on tonight’s broadcast, was direct: the peace envoy represents Israel, not the United States. The peace envoy is Jared Kushner. Kait Justice, writing at Downwind of Truth, has been tracing the Kushner thread for over a month. Tonight she laid the pieces out together. In 2021, at the close of Donald Trump’s first administration, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund put two billion dollars into Kushner’s newly formed Affinity Partners. The fund’s own board advised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against the investment — Kushner, the board said, had neither the experience nor the track record for the money. The Crown Prince overrode the board. Affinity Partners now reports six billion dollars under management, up from four-point-eight billion in 2024. The mission of the firm, Justice said on air, is to create an investment channel between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That mission has a paper trail that runs through Jeffrey Epstein. In emails surfaced in Justice’s reporting, Epstein wrote to a Qatari royal that “if the people would allow your country to recognize Israel, it could be interesting to discuss.” The email predates the Abraham Accords — Kushner’s signature first-term diplomatic achievement — by two years. In a parallel thread, Epstein pitched the Saudi royal court on an oil-backed currency and a compliant cryptocurrency, claiming on the page that he had already spoken to the founders of Bitcoin. Kushner’s network picked up the pieces Epstein left behind, and built the firm Riyadh now writes the checks to. PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org On the opening night of Narativ’s five-part investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, independent journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez — whose document reporting at The Pugilist is the proximate cause of the 2026 New Mexico Department of Justice criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch — sat down with Zev Shalev to walk through the archive she has been building around the 7,500-acre property halfway between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories where Jeffrey Epstein ran his New Mexico operation for nearly three decades. Valdes-Rodriguez led with the microwave link. Zorro Development Corporation, the Epstein entity that held the ranch, filed five FCC microwave licenses; the estate maintained them after Epstein’s 2019 death, and when Texas millionaires Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines purchased the property in 2023 they cancelled three of the five and kept two. “It’s a bidirectional system,” Valdes-Rodriguez told Shalev. “One of them transmits from the ranch to the top of Sandia Crest.” She has pulled DOJ emails in which the general contractor who installed the system described it, in his own words, as “a military-industrial grade system, and very expensive.” The ranch next door, which shares more than two miles of fence line with Zorro, is owned by the estate of Henry Singleton — founder of the defense contractor Teledyne and, as Valdes-Rodriguez noted on air, a trustee of Ronald Reagan’s blind trust. Teledyne was later fined for knowingly selling non-functional components to Sandia. The two microwave licenses expire on July 12, 2026. Shalev walked the audience through the Robert Maxwell FBI file — 105-25063, opened by J. Edgar Hoover on December 9, 1953 under the classification “Internal Security — R & GE” — and the parallels between Maxwell’s October 1954 attempt to recruit the directors of Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories through a journal he owned and Epstein’s later endowment of a chair at the Santa Fe Institute in Robert Maxwell’s name. “The simplest explanation for all of these things,” Shalev told viewers, “is these guys were spies, and they were trying to get nuclear secrets to their countries that they could sell them.” Valdes-Rodriguez reminded viewers that Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s daughter, is on record saying she was the one who first brought Epstein to New Mexico. Then came John J. Kelly. Kelly, Valdes-Rodriguez explained, was a private Albuquerque attorney and the chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party, introduced to Epstein by the sitting governor, Bruce King. Kelly signed as Epstein’s Power of Attorney on the 1993 Zorro purchase and on the state-land leases that expanded the property by thousands of acres. Eight months later, Kelly was confirmed as United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico. He served through the end of the Clinton administration. Maria and Annie Farmer began reporting Epstein to the FBI in 1996. “He never, in his entire tenure as U.S. Attorney for this district of New Mexico, ever opened any kind of investigation into Jeffrey Epstein,” Valdes-Rodriguez said. When a local TV reporter years later asked Kelly why his name appeared in Epstein’s files, Kelly replied: “You’ll have to ask Mr. Epstein.” PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

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Five nights. Five of the independent investigators who have been digging where the DOJ and the FBI would rather you didn’t. Five secrets that haven’t been told, and in some cases have been actively buried for decades. Monday at 8 PM ET, we begin with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on the Zorro Ranch. A new secret every night this week. 8 PM ET. WATCH LIVE FOR FREE — every night at 8 PM ET on Narativ. No paywall on the live broadcast. SUBSCRIBE TO WATCH LATER — paid subscribers get on-demand access after each show. PAID MEMBER Q&A WITH THE WRITERS — every night this week, each investigator stays after the broadcast for a private Q&A with paid subscribers. Bring your questions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org Former Attorney General Pam Bondi is trying to walk away from the biggest cover-up in American history — and the White House is helping her do it. On Narativ Live, Zev Shalev and Epstein archive researcher Ellie Leonard unpacked the Bondi escape plan, then dove deep into 1,800 pages of newly analyzed emails between Jeffrey Epstein and journalist Michael Wolff that reveal a decade-long criminal syndicate connecting Epstein, Wolff, Steve Bannon, and the Saudi royal family. Bondi, who was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee while serving as attorney general, is now refusing to testify after abruptly leaving her post. New AG Todd Blanche — Trump’s former defense attorney — says she no longer needs to appear. But as Oversight Committee members have pointed out, the subpoena was issued to Pam Bondi by name, not to the office she held. “Whether she’s attorney general or not really is a moot point,” Leonard said. “She knows what she was asked to not present to the American people, what to redact. She knows how many times Donald Trump is in those files.” The reason for the maneuver appears to be the Fifth Amendment: as a sitting attorney general, Bondi likely could not plead the Fifth before Congress. As a civilian, she can. “Which is why they fired her,” Shalev said. “They realized if she stays in the job, she’s got to go in there and lie. That’s perjury.” Hakeem Jeffries said Friday morning he was determined to make Bondi testify. The questions she needs to answer go beyond what’s in the Epstein files — who ordered the redactions? Did the president of the United States tell his attorney general to cover up his own criminal history? “Now you’ve got a conspiracy to obstruct justice at the highest levels of American politics,” Shalev said. “It’s the biggest scandal we’ve had since Watergate.” PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Netanyahu forced into Lebanon peace talks after 254 dead and global backlash cracked his diplomatic shield. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — 20% of the world’s oil. The ceasefire is falling apart. Into the middle of this, the White House sent JD Vance to Pakistan. His pitch? His wife likes skydiving. The Iranians also want to jump — out of the path of American bombs. Then Melania Trump did something she never does: walked in front of cameras and denied knowing Epstein. Named the Daily Beast, Carville, HarperCollins. Demanded Congress hear the survivors. Nobody asked her to do this. Something is coming. And the American right spent the day mocking a Canadian MP’s acronym instead of asking whether the world is safer tonight than it was yesterday. It isn’t. Thank you Thoughtful Suzie, Deb J, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

In an extraordinary and unprecedented appearance before the press corps at the White House this afternoon, First Lady Melania Trump delivered a video statement carried live on C-SPAN flatly denying any meaningful relationship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The First Lady, who almost never speaks publicly, called the reporting about her ties to Epstein “lies” from people “devoid of ethical standards, humility, and respect,” and demanded Congress convene a public hearing for Epstein’s victims. “I’ve never been friends with Epstein,” she said. “Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach.” She insisted Epstein did not introduce her to Donald Trump, claiming instead that she met her husband “by chance” at a New York City party in 1998, and that her first encounter with Epstein wasn’t until 2000. The statement caps weeks of an aggressive retraction campaign by Melania’s attorneys. The Daily Beast pulled a story. Hunter Biden received a cease-and-desist letter. Michael Wolff is reportedly being sued over a legal threat. James Carville and HarperCollins UK have been pressured into public apologies. But today’s on-camera appearance goes dramatically further than anything we’ve seen before — and as I said on air, “For her to come out and do a press conference and an announcement ahead of what might be further disclosures about her and Epstein may only just heighten the interest in what we’re going to find out in the coming weeks.” The timing is conspicuous. Narativ’s own reporting from the Epstein Files tells a very different story than the one Melania delivered from the podium. A congratulatory email sent to Jeffrey Epstein on the morning of November 9, 2016 — hours after Trump won the presidency — contains a devastating aside from the sender: “I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania. He kept on coming out of the bedroom saying, wow, what a hot piece of ass.” That note, recovered from Epstein’s email account and released under the Epstein Transparency Act, places Trump meeting Melania on the same weekend as a visit to Epstein’s Palm Beach estate — directly contradicting the “chance meeting at a New York party” story Melania repeated today. Three years later, on July 12, 2019 — three days after Epstein’s arrest — a former model who had worked as Epstein’s assistant from roughly 2005 to 2006 sat down with FBI agents and federal prosecutors in West Palm Beach under a proffer agreement and gave a strikingly similar account under oath. Before going to work for Epstein, that witness was connected to modeling agent Paolo Zampoli — the same man who claims to have introduced Donald and Melania at a Kit Kat Club party in 1998, and whom Trump later appointed as his special envoy for international partnerships. The documentary thread running through Zampoli, Epstein’s modeling operation, and the Trump marriage is not a social-circles coincidence. It’s a network. Epstein investigator Ellie Leonard, who joined me on air moments after the statement, called the performance “frantic and a little pushed.” As Ellie put it, “You can hardly see Donald Trump’s lips moving.” The dates don’t line up. The photographs of Melania with Ghislaine Maxwell don’t line up. The idea that Donald Trump — Epstein’s best friend during those years — simply left Melania behind every time he socialized with Jeffrey doesn’t line up. “It’s so able to be deconstructed, like every piece of what she’s saying,” Ellie said. “It’s better for them to probably say nothing at this point.” That they chose to say something — and chose to put the First Lady herself in front of the cameras to say it — tells you everything about what they’re bracing for. This is a preemptive strike. The First Lady of the United States does not break a years-long public silence to deny a story that’s already out. She breaks it to get ahead of a story that’s coming. Narativ is an independent investigative newsroom. Support our reporting at narativ.org.Thank you Leah Anderson, Skutt Hope, Miss Myra, CO, Lori Modafferi, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

President Donald Trump has declared a two-week ceasefire in the war with Iran, announcing the suspension in a Truth Social post timestamped 6:32 PM Eastern — eighty-eight minutes before his own 8:00 PM ultimatum to begin destroying Iran’s bridges, power plants and hospitals was set to expire. Trump described the agreement as a “double-sided ceasefire.” According to his post, the suspension was triggered by direct conversations with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, who asked Trump to hold off the bombing in exchange for Iran agreeing to “the complete, immediate and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump also said the United States has received a 10-point proposal from Iran that he describes as “a workable basis on which to negotiate,” and that “almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran.” The two-week pause, in his words, will allow the agreement “to be finalized and consummated.” The announcement ends — at least for now — the most acute U.S.-Iran military crisis in a generation. As recently as this morning, Trump was telling the world on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Tonight’s strikes are not happening. There are still significant unknowns. As of this broadcast, Tehran has not publicly confirmed the ceasefire terms. Pakistan has not issued an independent statement. We do not yet know the full contents of the alleged 10-point Iranian proposal, and we do not know whether Israel was consulted before Trump went public. The single most important data point in the next 24 to 48 hours is whether the Strait of Hormuz actually reopens. The word “immediate” in Trump’s post is doing a lot of work. If commercial tankers begin transiting the strait in the next few hours, the deal is real. If the strait stays closed, this was either a bluff or something else. There is also a real possibility that the entire announcement is theater — what Trump’s critics have been calling “Taco Tuesday,” a manufactured climbdown dressed up as a triumph. Trump will play this to the hilt either way. Expect him in the coming days to claim that his threats worked, that the bombing schedule itself forced Tehran to the table, and that this is “the art of the deal” in action. The honest read from Narativ is this: Trump has been telegraphing a confrontation he never fully wanted. He admitted yesterday at the podium that the American people did not want him to do this. He went into a war for unnecessary reasons. He has burned through American ammunition at a rate the Pentagon will spend a decade replacing. He killed the so-called regime leadership in Iran but did not produce regime change — he simply replaced the old leadership with a younger version of the same thing. None of that is a victory. But Donald Trump will sell it as one. Earlier today, Narativ published a special report arguing that this conflict was, at root, about oil — about reactivating the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, about pushing Brent crude above the $120-per-barrel war floor, and about a syndicate of interests that runs through Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and the MAGA franchise of the global oil economy. Tonight’s announcement does not contradict that thesis. If anything, it confirms it. The condition Trump set is not Iran’s nuclear program. It is not regime behavior. It is not hostages or proxies. It is the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. That is a commercial demand, not a security demand. It is the demand of an oil syndicate that has gotten exactly what it needed: a war premium high enough to reprice every barrel in the system, and now a path to normalize Iranian oil flows back into the West — possibly alongside Russian flows, since those sanctions have also been quietly eased. In other words: the war was the catalyst. The ceasefire is the deal. And the deal is about the oil. We will continue to follow this story closely over the coming days as Tehran, Islamabad, and Tel Aviv respond. For now, what we know is this. Trump says there is a ceasefire. He says it is double-sided. He says it was negotiated by Pakistan. He says strikes are delayed for two weeks. And he says the price is the immediate and complete reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The 8:00 PM deadline is over. Tonight, the bridges of Iran will not fall. Narativ is a reader-supported investigation into the syndicate behind the news. Subscribe at narativ.org. Thank you Cathy Stein, Tracy Giddings, Jason Gael, Kathleen, Sandy W, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org This morning on Truth Social, Donald Trump doubled down on the ultimatum he issued from the White House yesterday. Tonight, 8:00 PM Eastern. Surrender — or every bridge, every power plant, every hospital in Iran goes dark. 93 million people pushed into the Stone Age by deadline. His exact words this morning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” That is the most audacious threat ever issued by an American head of state — death, corruption and extortion deployed openly against a sovereign nation of 93 million people. And he is using the very same tactics he claims to be ending. We are hearing from the ground that Iran is not defeated, there is no regime change, and there is certainly not going to be the end of a civilization. But the threat itself tells you everything you need to know about who Donald Trump is right now. So why is he doing this? The answer is money, money, money — and oil, oil, oil. Tonight on Narativ, we showed exactly how Trump’s interests align with Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to make sure American troops and American firepower are being used to secure oil for our adversaries. PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Lev Parnas had a contrarian take on the Bondi firing. “She’s not getting fired. She’s not being reprimanded. She’s being put out to pasture making hundreds of millions of dollars as the ex-attorney general,” he said, calling the move theatrical — a Trump news cycle play designed to distract from a failing Iran war, collapsing poll numbers, and the Epstein files bearing down on the White House. Parnas argued that the real action was not the firing itself but what it accomplished: buying time, prolonging the cover-up, and ensuring Todd Blanche, who was already managing the Epstein file, now has full control of the Justice Department. “Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do,” he said. Shalev pushed back — this is a massive story, the attorney general fired twelve days before a sworn deposition on the Epstein files — and Parnas conceded the point. “It’s a big story,” he said. “But tomorrow everybody’s going to wake up and say, what changed? Todd Blanche is in charge.” Worse, not better. And Blanche is deeply compromised. Ellie Leonard laid out exactly how. Blanche conducted the two-day proffer interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in July, in which Maxwell gave a clean statement about Trump being “a nice guy and completely uninvolved.” Leonard noted that whenever Maxwell began to say something that might have yielded real information, Blanche steered her away. Immediately after the interviews, Maxwell was upgraded to a lower-security facility — “what we call Club Fed, where she’s got Pilates and a puppy,” Leonard said. Maxwell perjured herself throughout those proffers, Leonard added, and it was easily provable from every file that came out afterward. She claimed Epstein had no computers when the FBI found roughly a hundred hard drives. She claimed she never saw him with young girls or with Trump. Blanche let all of it stand. Leonard warned that the Epstein files themselves may now be at risk. “Go download everything you can,” she told viewers, “because my guess is this is going to disappear.” With Blanche running the DOJ, she expects the department’s search pages and publicly available records to be quietly pulled or altered rather than expanded. Shalev connected the firings into a pattern. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security. Pam Bondi at Justice. Potentially Tulsi Gabbard at Intelligence — Parnas reported he believes she could be gone imminently. All three are women, all three led agencies central to the president’s internal and external security apparatus, and all three faced situations in which telling the truth under oath could incriminate the president. “We’re not talking about stealing something from the corner store,” Shalev said. “We’re talking about the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl.” The DOJ and FBI cover-up of the Jane Doe 4 allegations remains at the center of the crisis. Leonard has been investigating the Jane Doe 4 case out of South Carolina and described it as “a second chance to get it right” — a reference to the Katie Johnson case, which she said did not receive the investigative attention it deserved at the time. She credited the Post and Courier of Charleston for doing extraordinary local investigative work that has verified details many thought could never be confirmed, including connections to the Renaissance Weekend, a gathering on Hilton Head Island organized by Philip Lader that became Bill Clinton’s inner circle in the 1980s and 1990s. Epstein’s emails confirm his awareness of the event, and flight logs place him in the area repeatedly in later years. The organizers told Leonard they swear Epstein was never there but cannot produce records to prove it. The conversation turned to Michael Wolff, whom Leonard described as having functioned as Epstein’s journalism fixer in New York — making stories disappear and discrediting reporters who covered Epstein. Wolff conducted roughly a hundred hours of interviews with Epstein, and Leonard said that when you have that volume of material from the head of a thirty-year global crime syndicate involving children and billions of dollars, it must be made public. “If we had a hundred hours of interviews with Al Capone, you bet those would have been made public,” she said. Leonard has been in contact with Joanna Coles, the senior editor at the Daily Beast who co-hosts a podcast with Wolff, and has shared email threads that carry potential legal implications. Parnas added that Wolff and Coles have been releasing snippets of the Epstein tapes strategically on their podcast to drive traffic — but withholding the most damaging material. “They’re not releasing the tape where Epstein says Melania and Trump slept on my plane,” Parnas said. Shalev called it what it is: if people are sitting on evidence while a crime is still in progress, that is obstruction of justice. Breaking news landed during the show: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Army Chief of Staff General Randy George to step down and retire, an extraordinary move amid the Iran war. Shalev noted this followed reporting about Hegseth’s broker attempting trades before the Iran strikes and Trump’s private admission at the leaked Easter lunch that seizing Iranian oil is a non-starter — a direct contradiction of his public address to the nation hours later. The military, Shalev suggested, may have told the president no. The administration is in trouble — cornered on Iran, hemorrhaging cabinet members, cratering in the polls. But as all three agreed, this is no time to take the heat off. The cover-up has a new gatekeeper, the Epstein files face a more compromised DOJ than ever, and the midterms are the only mechanism left for accountability. Parnas closed with a call to action. In coordination with Defiance.org and MeidasTouch, he is organizing a daily national phone and email campaign targeting members of Congress — a modernized protest designed to flood congressional offices until elected officials respond. The first demand: kill the Save America Act, which Parnas called an unconstitutional attempt to suppress mail-in voting through a national registration list administered by the U.S. Postal Service. “This midterm election is our presidential election,” Parnas said. Shalev agreed. If Democrats take the House in November, the Speaker could become president — and this regime, on its current trajectory, may not survive the accountability that follows. Narativ Live is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Narativ is produced at narativ.org. Thank you Lyudmila and Daniel, Rick Kohut, Sharon Dymond, Jude T Conway, LC - Silence is Complicity, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

I joined Wajahat Ali on The Left Hook to talk about what nearly a decade of following the Epstein-Trump money trail has revealed — and why the financial crimes matter as much as the abuse. The conversation started where The Greatest Heist leaves off: Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a human trafficker. He was a criminal financial mastermind who helped design the derivatives that seeded the 2008 crash, buried a vehicle called Liquid Funding inside Bear Stearns that got bailed out to the tune of $6.7 billion with taxpayer money, and was actively advising Vladimir Putin on how to leapfrog the American economy using cryptocurrency. “We’ve got all the receipts to prove that’s what happened,” I told Wajahat. “And it’s interesting that as we were discovering that, Howard Lutnick’s name showed up in the same scheme back in 2008, also part of that trigger of the 2008 crash.” The Lutnick-Tether closed loop is one of the most dangerous financial arrangements in the country right now. Tether, the stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, has $133 billion in U.S. Treasuries locked inside Cantor Fitzgerald — Lutnick’s former company. When Lutnick became Commerce Secretary, he sold his stake to his children through a trust that was financed by Tether itself. “So Tether not only owns the cryptocurrency, it owns the custodian of that cryptocurrency, and it owns the family that supposedly is looking after this whole thing,” I explained. “And Lutnick is the guy in the White House who can actually determine whether they’ll get a bailout or not if it all crashes.” The first thing Todd Blanche did when he walked into the DOJ was kill the cryptocurrency investigations — all of them — including the one into Tether that was active under the Biden administration in December 2024. Wajahat drew the chain in real time and it was striking to hear out loud. Donald Trump and his family have made up to $5 billion through World Liberty Financial. The person who helped them make that money — CZ of Binance — got pardoned by Trump. The Genius Act, the first pro-crypto legislation, was pushed through by Trump. David Sachs, the AI and crypto czar, came up through the PayPal mafia with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Thiel was buddy-buddy with Epstein and shared his eugenics worldview. Musk gave Trump the most money to win the election. None of that is conspiracy theory. It’s all documented. We went deep on Leon Black’s $158 million payments to Epstein — supposedly for tax advice, but much of it, we now know, went to pay off women that Black had abused. Black was also the only American on Russia’s RDIF board, led by Kirill Dmitriev, and there’s a photo of him at a board meeting with Putin two seats away, smiling. Black worked at Drexel Burnham Lambert when it collapsed in the 1987 crash, then opened Apollo — a firm with deep Russian business ties. When Epstein needed to make a Leon Black abuse allegation go away, he contacted Sergei Belikov, an FSB-trained official at Russia’s economic ministry, for information to kill the lawsuit. “That’s the kind of stuff that — I mean, I don’t know how to do that,” I said. “You know how to call someone at the FSB and say, hey, my friend’s got a problem. How do I kill this thing?” The Rothschild connection surfaced through Leslie Wexner’s recent deposition testimony, where he revealed that he got a reference for Epstein from the Rothschilds. A working-class kid from Brooklyn getting recommendations from Elie de Rothschild because he’d been working for the Rothschild bank in Europe. Last week, Rothschild Bank was raided in France in connection with the Epstein investigation — joining a pattern that includes Lord Mandelson’s resignation as UK ambassador over his Epstein ties and Prince Andrew’s arrest for passing sensitive documents to Epstein. Both Wajahat and I addressed something critical: how to report on networks that include prominent Jewish individuals without feeding antisemitic conspiracy theories. I’m Jewish. Wajahat is Muslim. We both believe the answer is more specificity, not less. As David Kleon wrote in Jewish Currents, Epstein exploited Jewish in-group bonds to cultivate his network. But the Epstein class includes Jews, Christians, atheists, and Muslims. It is the world’s 1% of the 1%. The danger is that when you refuse to investigate specific criminals because of their background, you create a vacuum that actual antisemites like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes fill with blanket accusations against all Jews. The vast majority of American Jews are liberal-minded, centrist, hardworking people who have contributed enormously to this country. The small extremist networks that Epstein operated within are weaponizing themselves against those very communities — and rising antisemitism is the result. The bottom line: an estimated $80 trillion has been pulled out of the U.S. market and taxpayers’ pockets over 40 years through repeated pump-and-dump cycles — 1987, 2008, and now what looks like an AI-crypto bubble ready to burst. The same architects keep showing up. The sovereign funds of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Russia keep buying American assets at pennies on the dollar after each crash. And the people holding the bag, every single time, are ordinary Americans who lost their homes, their retirement savings, and their children’s futures. This is personal for every American. And it’s treasonous. Watch the full conversation on The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali. Zev Shalev is an Emmy-nominated, Murrow Award-winning investigative journalist and founder of narativ.org. The Greatest Heist is available at narativ.org. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Michael Wolff arrived on Substack like a hero. He had 100 hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, insider access to the darkest corners of the network, and the credibility of a bestselling author who had gone toe-to-toe with Donald Trump. Then 1,800 pages of his emails with Epstein were released, and the picture changed completely. “You start to see this different side of Michael Wolff,” Leonard said. “He’s getting manuscripts for books about Epstein before they’re published and trying to warn Epstein. He’s helping with Wikipedia cleanups. He’s trying to crush Nick Kristof’s reputation. You realize he has become Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer.” Wolff arranged dinners with Woody Allen, caught and killed stories about Epstein’s sex trafficking history, and coached Epstein on counter-narratives — all while presenting himself as a journalist. He even tried to discredit Julie K. Brown’s Miami Herald investigation, the very reporting that led to Epstein’s arrest. And those 100 hours of interviews? Nobody has ever heard them. Leonard believes the recordings contain material that would damage Wolff’s reputation and undermine his franchise of writing about Trump — who was, after all, the subject Epstein was most willing to discuss. Then came the podcast. Wolff appeared on Michael Cohen’s Mea Culpa, where the two men dismissed Shalev, Leonard, Lev Parnas, and Dean Blundell as “conspiracy buffs” and “far left wing activists” who live in a “fantasy world.” Cohen, who spent 12 years as Trump’s personal attorney during the height of Epstein’s power, continues to insist he knew nothing about any of it. DOJ documents tell a different story. Cohen tried to separate the Katie Johnson rape allegation into two different cases during a Patrick David podcast appearance, but his own timeline collapsed — the same lawyers represented the accuser across all filings, and the private investigator Cohen sent to the accuser’s address described a “vacant parking lot” that turned out to be a house. “All you’re doing is literally just pulling up documents that already exist and turning them around and showing people,” Leonard said. “There’s no opinion involved.” The deeper question is why Wolff would even appear with Cohen. Shalev argued it only makes sense as a network operation: Cohen is pursuing a pardon deal, offering to recant his Stormy Daniels testimony in exchange for Trump cleaning his record. The network needs Cohen credible, which means the people reading the files need to be discredited. “They’re coming after the people who are exposing the truth about them,” Shalev said. “Because they don’t want the truth out there.” Leonard and Shalev noted that Wolff and Steve Bannon operated as parallel personalities in Epstein’s orbit — both claiming 100 hours of interviews, both offering the same cover story of image rehabilitation, both serving as go-betweens in a world where friendships were transactional intelligence operations. Leonard is continuing her work on the Wolff emails, the Hilton Head South Carolina investigation that gained mainstream pickup this week, and what she describes as things happening behind the scenes. The invitation to both men remains open: come on the show and answer questions from the conspiracy buffs. Narativ Live streams on YouTube, Substack, and narativ.org. Follow Ellie Leonard at The Panicked Writer on Substack. Thank you Centered America, Amy Gabrielle, Caro Henry, LC - Silence is Complicity, Bre Phillips, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

On the day that may go down as the largest protest in American history, Narativ Live went live with Army veteran Nick Paro to cover No Kings Day as it unfolded across the country. With early estimates placing domestic participation between 8 and 12 million people, the third No Kings action shattered all previous records — and broke the critical 3.5% threshold that has historically preceded the fall of every authoritarian regime that faced sustained peaceful resistance. The flagship rally at the Minnesota State Capitol drew over 100,000 people to the city where ICE killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year. Bruce Springsteen debuted “Streets of Minneapolis,” a song written for the occasion, calling out “King Trump’s private army from the DHS” and honoring the two Minnesotans by name. “They picked the wrong city,” Springsteen told the crowd. “Your strength and your commitment told us that this is still America. And this reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand.” Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, Tom Morello, the Brass Solidarity Band and the Resistance Choir all took the stage in what became part protest, part concert, part memorial. Jane Fonda read a statement from Becca Good, Renee’s widow, that brought the crowd to silence. “My wife sparkled with sunshine and shone with kindness that is unmatched,” Becca wrote. “We were robbed of an incredible human. It has made people pause and take a breath and have to choose sides. We choose the side of love.” She called for “radical kindness” — a phrase that became the emotional throughline of the day. Minnesota Governor Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Nation, delivered the day’s most forceful political speech. “When federal agents kill our neighbors in the streets, when cowards vote to steal healthcare and food off the table, and billionaires rip off everyday people, and wannabe dictators start illegal wars — we will not be silent,” she said. She invoked Paul Wellstone: “Sometimes you gotta pick a fight to win one.” Paro, who traveled to Minneapolis weeks earlier with Veterans Fighting Fascism for an Abolish ICE event honoring Good and Pretti, described a community transformed. “They are so mad. But they are so together,” he said. “They have solidified around each other and the love for each other. Prince said a long time ago that Minnesota would be the start of the revolution. I don’t think he was wrong.” He noted that zero protesters were arrested — a sign, he said, that ICE stayed away from the sheer scale of the mobilization. Paro tracked crowd estimates throughout the broadcast: New York City drew 350,000, Washington D.C. at least 200,000, San Francisco over 220,000, Boston more than 100,000. International solidarity marches took place in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid and across Canada — organized under the banner “No Tyrants” out of respect for nations that have constitutional monarchies. Zev also shared his post “We Are The Light,” a meditation on the America that was promised versus the America that exists — the one bombing Iran without authorization, jailing journalists, criminalizing peacemakers, and deporting five-year-olds. “The presidency is occupied. The House and Senate are captured. The courts are cornered,” he said. “But the people — the people are free. We are the people. We are the light.” Joan Baez and Maggie Rogers dueted on “The Times They Are a-Changin’” — the song Baez first sang with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Grenada, Mississippi, and again at the March on Washington. Tom Morello jumped in for the final verse with the lyric adjusted for the moment: “So get the f**k out the way if you can’t lend a hand, for the times they are a-changin’.” Thank you Cheech Previti, Pamela, Leah Anderson, Eric Lullove, Skutt Hope, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nick Paro and Banner & Backbone Media! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org Tonight we published Chapter 9 of The Greatest Heist, Book 2 — “The Windfall” — and sat down with two people who helped build the picture: Lev Parnas, who did business with Cantor Fitzgerald in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, who has spent months in the Epstein files alongside us. The chapter reveals that Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald appears to have been operating as a Russian front — a primary dealer with direct access to the Federal Reserve that two separate FBI whistleblowers, four months apart, linked to Russian money laundering. Read the full chapter: Lev took us back to the 1990s, when the Russian mob was flooding into Wall Street through unregulated pink sheet stocks and penny stocks. The Italian mob got there first, but the Russians took it a step further — they had real money to invest, and they understood the system. Pump and dump, boiler rooms, shell companies. The schemes were identical at every level. What Jordan Belfort did with penny stocks, the same network did with sovereign wealth funds and toxic mortgage securities. As Lev put it: it doesn’t matter if it’s a pink sheet stock or a New York Stock Exchange stock — the scheme is the same, the information is the same, the way it’s done is the same. Just different levels. This Deep Dive is for paid subscribers. Read more below.