The Broken Elbow

Many thanks to HC for this tip-off. An interesting survey by Simon Kuper of The Financial Times of mainland European views on Brexit and the Brits. Not pleasant reading for BoJo and his merry band…..

You really couldn’t make up this front page story in today’s News Letter. Who gave this berk the top job in the PSNI?

His name, apparently, is Simon Byrne. Shouldn’t it be Simon Trump?

Here is the equally mind-blowing text that followed:

Violent paramilitaries face losing their children to state care, Northern Ireland’s new chief constable has warned.

Simon Byrne said people engaged in shootings are unfit to have custody of a youngster, and pledged to target them.

“My message to them is ‘you carry on doing this, we will have your house, if you keep going we will have your car, we will have your kids, we will have your benefits and we will put you in jail’.”

He added: “Why would I think you are safe in the presence of young children? So what safeguarding powers have we got to take your kids into care if that is a deterrent?

“I think we need to be more assertive, work with other agencies within the law to make people think twice before stepping into this space.”

Mr Byrne said it is time for communities to tell dissidents enough is enough.

“The use of paramilitary attacks, beatings, breaking people’s legs, other limbs, in the name of the rule of law is just odious.

“How anyone could think that is justified in a civil society is beyond me.

He criticised parents of children involved in disorder.

“The children I watched, I am guessing were early teenagers.

“I just found it strange that an adult would sit and watch as if it was evening entertainment, rather than actually intervene to stop anything.

“It relied on my officers driving past in the Land Rover that clearly became the target for the petrol bomb, and that seemed to be part of the sport, which I think was entirely unacceptable.”

Police have exercised stop-and-search powers around 35,000 times between 2010 and last year. In most circumstances an officer will need grounds to conduct a search.

The Justice and Security NI Act 2007 provides for searches without grounds to counter terrorism or if there is a risk of serious violence or disorder.

Mr Byrne said it is impossible to compare NI’s statistics to England, where use of the power has decreased, because its figures are so strongly influenced by London.

He said there is no like-for-like comparison between the powers used in NI in many cases and in Great Britain.

“We use the power to deter criminality and we put other agencies and partners into that space to calm things down and to build relationships and opportunities in those communities, so I am not calling for stop and search to stop.

“I think it needs to be used carefully, we need to ensure we are fair, we are proportionate and work within the law, but actually, at the same time as people have concerns, other communities want to see more of it.”

 

When people who were your contemporaries when you were young and fit start to pop off, then it is time to get worried. I knew Ciaran McKeown quite well when we were both students at QUB, he the president of the Students’ Union and me a first year undergraduate who did some work for the university paper Gown.

So his death yesterday is a reminder of one’s own mortality. He is of course best known for his part in the creation in 1976 of the Peace People along with Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty vision but even back then it was clear that the naivete and contradictions inherent in the Peace People, essentially that only the IRA was to blame for the violence, would be the movement’s undoing.

Ciaran had left The Irish Press to start the Peace People so when the movement finally disintegrated he had no job and was essentially unemployable. The last time I saw him was when, as Northern Editor of The Irish Times, I hired him to transcribe the tape recording of Ian Paisley’s famous Kincora press conference at the Martyr’s Memorial church in east Belfast.

By chance I recently came across the clip of a news broadcast dated from August 1969 showing Ciaran urging the Irish government to invade the North in the wake of Loyalist attacks on Nationalist areas. What crazy days they were:

The article below by the News Letter’s Sam McBride which appeared last Thursday illustrates where, in my view, the danger of renewed violence in the North really lies.

Not at a Brexit-bred hard Border but by the British indulging the DUP in order to keep Boris Johnson in Downing Street and in the process abandoning the balance implicit in the Good Friday Agreement.

Now, you could argue that the Northern Ireland Office’s decision to remove the British monarch’s photograph from the walls of Stormont House was a step too far in the direction of Sinn Fein. And you would be right, even though human rights legislation and not just an over-indulgent NIO official could be blamed.

But having taken that decision, a new Northern Secretary reversing it at this sensitive time sends a pretty loud message, particularly since Unionists were outraged at the decision to remove royal portraits and putting them back looks like a climb-down to pressure.

If I was a Shinner or one of their supporters I’d be worried. You can read the full article here:

Readers of this blog will, I hope, forgive me if I repeat a story I first made public in the introduction to Bob White’s biography of the late IRA leader Ruairi O Bradaigh.

It was the publicity surrounding Peter Taylor’s recent documentary on the IRA, and his admission that he would have enlisted in the Provos’ ranks in the wake of Bloody Sunday had he been a Bogsider, that has prompted me to recall the story.

And that was because what happened to me in my dealings with the Provos also happened to him, though I doubt he ever knew it. If he had known I wonder whether he would have been as quick to admit his post Bloody Sunday sympathies.

Peter Taylor

One of my first assignments as a wet behind the ears reporter for Magill magazine back in 1980 was a lengthy piece on the takeover of the IRA by Gerry Adams and his friends and the threat this posed to the leadership of Sinn Fein, then still in the hands of Ruairi O Bradaigh.

It was, needless to say, a controversial piece because it rehearsed the bitter struggle between the two camps and the role played in it by the 1975 IRA ceasefire crafted by the then leadership, symbolised by O Bradaigh and Daithi O Conaill.

The accusation leveled by the Adams camp was that the O Bradaigh/O Conaill camp had been hoodwinked by the British who had used the ceasefire, not to prepare the way for withdrawal, but to build a brand new prison which would house the victims of a tough new criminalisation policy aimed at extirpating the IRA.

Many years later O Bradaigh told me that the appearance of that edition of Magill was the cause of a particularly rowdy meeting of the Sinn Fein ard-comhairle at which the Adams camp was accused by the O Bradaigh camp of inspiring the Magill article and being its principal source.

The outcome of that meeting, he told me, was an agreement by the Adams’ camp never to speak to me again and, in conjunction with everyone else in Sinn Fein, to shun me and my journalistic endeavours.

I cannot say that I noticed any difference at all in my dealings afterwards with the Provos. That was because I was based in Belfast and the Northern Provos with whom I met carried on as before, as if the ard comhairle edict had never been issued.

It was only when I attended SF events in Dublin, such as the ard-fheis, that I noticed the change. Whenever I made an attempt to speak to O Bradaigh or O Conaill they would turn on their heels and speed away.

Many years later I told this story to a member of the IRA Army Council and he responded with the following. But first a bit of background. The Army Council then was divided into two types. Those who held dual membership of Sinn Fein and those who did not. The latter had next to no time for political activity; they were soldiers first and last.

Anyway at a particular Army Council meeting the subject of Peter Tayor came up raised by, shall we say, elements sympathetic to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, people who held dual membership of both the political and military wings.

The Council’s politicians had a warning to give their soldier colleagues. Peter Taylor’s job at the BBC was just a cover for his real role, which was as a spy for MI5, the British intelligence agency, they announced. No-one should have any dealings with him.

I cannot say with certainty how the Council’s politicians responded but I’d bet the mortgage they behaved exactly like their counterparts on the ard-comhairle had behaved towards me, i.e. they completely ignored the warning and continued to deal with the BBC man, while the soldiers rigorously obeyed the warning and shunned him religiously.

Nor can I say whether Peter Taylor ever learned of this episode or whether he continued to try to speak to the Army Council’s soldiers. I know that in my case normal relations with the other wing of Sinn Fein were eventually restored and I’d like to think that was because my journalism was seen to be even-handed.

But the two episodes do give a revealing insight into the devious ways of that section of the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership which eventually steered both organisations into the peace process.

Belfast journalist and broadcaster Martin Dillon recalls his effort to probe into the life of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who apparently committed suicide in a New York jail at the weekend as he awaited trial on new charges of sexually abusing minors:

In the wake of the sudden death in custody of the billionaire pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, whose passing has ominous echoes of the assassination of Robert Maxwell, I reminded myself of my links to both men. I co-authored a book about Maxwell – The Assassination of Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, but one on Epstein, well that got away.

Back in 2010, I became interested in Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious New York billionaire and pedophile who was also known as a philanthropist and Wall Street wizard. As a reputed Hedge Fund manager, he won the favors and friendships of rich and powerful people across the globe, including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, Ehud Barak, and the Saudi leader, Mohammed Bin Salman. 
Epstein’s name was familiar to me since it had often appeared in New York’s gossip and high society press columns. Columnists tended to focus on his immense wealth, supposedly accumulated on Wall Street, though without any documentation to prove that was indeed the case. He possessed a small fleet of jets, the biggest Manhattan’s townhouse in the Upper Eastside, an estate in Palm Beach, Florida, a home in Paris, a massive ranch in New Mexico with its own runway for passenger jets, and a private island in the Caribbean.

Martin Dillon

I first heard his name in 2002 after my book, “The Assassination of Robert Maxwell – Israel’s Superspy,” which I co-authored with late Gordon Thomas, hit shelves in Europe and the United States. Maxwell was a larger than life press mogul and Mossad spy who stole and spent the pension funds of his workers in Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper. He was also an international fraudster with secret accounts in Lichtenstein, in Bulgaria, and in off-shore havens such as Cyprus. And to top that he as one of Israel’s most important spies who helped steal America’s nuclear secrets. Under the pretense of opening the Eastern block to democracy, he was embraced by Kremlin leaders and by Bulgaria’s Communist dictator, Todor Zhivkov. FBI files from the 1950s note Maxwell’s suspicious travels through the Communist bloc and the unfettered access he had to its leaders.

When my book was published, it received a savage review in the Washington Post by the celebrity lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. That did not come as a shock, but I found it interesting that Dershowitz’s personal client and buddy was Jeffrey Epstein whose claimed lover was the New York socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late Robert Maxwell. I knew that Ghislaine and her sister, Isabel, who was based in San Francisco, were enterprising and highly committed to defending their father’s sullied reputation. Prior to my book being published, Isabel had somehow acquired a copy of the manuscript, which had been kept under wraps in New York and London publishers’ offices, and ran with it to Israel to present it to her father’s friend, Shimon Perez, the former Israeli president, as well as to David Kimche, a former head of Mossad. My co-author, Gordon Thomas, received a call from one of his Mossad sources who had been visited by Isabel Maxwell who demanded that he publicly denounce the book. No one she approached took the bait. Nevertheless the pressure on my New York publisher must have been considerable because the book was given almost no publicity when it reached the American market.

I had some uneasy experiences writing the Maxwell book, especially making contact with some unsavory people linked to his unknown activities in Eastern Europe. So, when I began looking closely at Epstein’s life, I had a feeling that I might be wading again in dangerous waters. 
In 2010, as I debated with myself whether I should write a book about Epstein, I knew that two years earlier he had walked out of court with a sweetheart deal even though he pleaded guilty on prostitution charges in Florida court and had to register as sex- offender. Back in New York as a level 3 sex offender he was required by law to show up to court mandated check-ins, but he didn’t do so for 8 years.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s alleged procuror

In 2011, the Manhattan district attorney’s office tried to help Epstein by reducing his sex-offender status to the lowest possible classification, which would have restricted his personal information to the public and would have kept him from being listed on the registry of sex offenders for life. This after he had been  proven to be a notorious sexual predator who preyed on underage girls, sexually abusing them in his Florida and New York mansions, on his jets and in homes abroad, including his private island.. He also trafficked girls in and out of the continental USA.

As I looked at his history, I became aware that while he was facing the Florida prosecution, he was surrounded by a powerful team of lawyers, including his friend, Alan Dershowitz. He rented offices opposite the detention c enter where he was being held and spent 15 hours a day in them, supposedly consulting with his lawyers. He would leave his c ell in the morning and return cell at night. He even paid Palm Beach Florida police officers to be his minders and gofers when he was in his offices. That absurd arrangement ran for eighteen months. He hired a team of private detectives who harassed his victims and their families, and finally all he received from the US legal system was a slap on the wrist. He served only 13 months of an 18 months sentence.

His victims were never told about the deal his lawyers struck with the US Federal Prosecutor in charge, Alex Acosta who until recently was Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary, with responsibility for combatting human trafficking. Acosta’s role in Epstein case has been described by a judge as a breach of law. There is little doubt in my mind that Acosta came under considerable pressure from Epstein’s legal team and his powerful friends to deliver a shameful legal outcome.

The scandal that should have arisen in 2008 following this legal travesty, and the fact that victims were kept in the dark, did not happen. The story did not appear to merit widespread coverage because most of the facts were hidden as part of the plea deal signed between Epstein and the Federal Government. No media outlet was anxious to expose how this pedophile who had abused a large number of girls had actually beaten the rap and received a slap on the wrist. No one, with a few exceptions, seemed eager to delve deeper into the evidence and give a voice to the victims, just as no one wanted to examine the origins of his wealth. How did a man who left no trace of his activities on Wall Street become, by his own admission, a billionaire? Who sold him the largest mansion in Manhattan because there was no documentation to show how much he paid for it, or the identity of the seller.

In 2002, The Vanity Fair investigative journalist Vicky Ward still stands out as the one person willing to take on Epstein before anyone did. She wrote a profile of him, delving into his questionable financial operations, and the lavish parties he threw in his Manhattan and Palm Beach residences, where celebrities from the worlds of politics, art, science and business were present. His parties were full of young girls, who were flown sometimes from other cities, or countries, on his private jets. When she subsequently tried to expose his weird sexual appetites and abuse of girls, she said that Graydon Carter, her Vanity Fair boss, killed her story after he met Epstein in one of his homes. The only other publications which it is fair to say kept a close eye on Epstein over the years were Britain’s Daily Mail and the New York Post. The Mail in particular published some shocking material about him, but generally the media on both sides of the Atlantic were content to ignore the story. As for Congress, it was silent.

Epstein was not shy about boasting of his conquests. He once claimed that a world renowned politician sent him at gift from Paris of twin girls to celebrate his birthday. They were flown back to Paris the following day. Those who know the identity of this politician have been wary of naming him. President Trump was a personal friend of Epstein and when asked in an interview what his opinion of him was, he didn’t spare praise, calling him a terrific guy who is a lot of fun to be with. Trump added: It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Video has emerged of Trump joking with Epstein about females dancing at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and golf club.
 Epstein operated mainly from his estate in Palm Beach, assisted by Ghislaine Maxwell, who recruited some of the girls, herself. He had special massage tables installed in all his properties and on his private jet. He preferred schoolgirls to “massage” him in the presence of one of his lady recruiters who usually gave instructions to the girls, supervising the action, and sometimes participating. Massages were precursors to other sexual activities.

The girls, often vulnerable and from poor backgrounds were paid hundreds of dollars in cash and promised other favors like college tuition .They were given extra money if they brought their school friends to him.  No one can state exactly how many girls he may have sexually abused over years in and outside the United States. He preferred girls as young as 14, and between 2001 through 2005 he created his own sex ring, a network of girls always at his disposal whenever he was in his Palm Beach and Manhattan residences 

My Epstein odyssey began in early 2010 when I received a call from a Palm Beach socialite who contacted me on advice of her friend. I was, she said, the ideal person to write a book on Epstein’s scandalous past. Her friend had read my book on Robert Maxwell and that spurred her to recommend me. I shall refer to this socialite as Mrs. A, as I do not have permission to reveal her identity. She matter-of-factly told me that she had amassed a lot of materials she could make available to me. She had also had access to a lawyer who represented some of Epstein victims, and to an important law enforcement figure in Palm Beach. She was somewhat vague about her obsession with the Epstein case, but she seemed pretty determined to expose his crimes to the American public. She knew that the real story remained untold.

By this time, the mainstream treated it like it was toxic. Mrs. A had approached a local writer, but soon after the project became known among certain circles in Palm Beach it fell through. She suspected the writer was bought off. 
She arranged to meet me in a luxe apartment that she kept in Manhattan. She was a good looking woman in her early fifties, and at first glance she didn’t differ much from the cliché of a socialite. She even had tiny dogs which socialites treasure as much as their designer bags and jewelry. She was knowledgeable about Epstein, his personality, his legal case, his bizarre sexual behaviors, as well as the complex but unexplained legal aspects connected to his case. She spoke with genuine concern for the girls he had trafficked and the complete lack of compassion and humanity with which the legal system had been treated them.

As we talked, it struck me that she might have been hurt emotionally by him. Had she been romantically connected to him in the past? Had he jilted her? She appeared to admit that she had been linked to him romantically in the past, but she did not feel it had any relevance to the matter in hand, namely me writing a book about him. I chose to leave the matter there. She subsequently refused to discuss the matter in later meetings with me. 
During our first meeting, she provided me with a box of documents, some of which were merely newspaper clippings and of limited value to a writer. Still there were other papers that grabbed my attention, especially victims.’ statements, phone logs from Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and flight logs. 
After months of poring into documents, trying to connect the dots, making phone calls to lawyers and victims, and linking up with potential sources, I was still not convinced writing a book on Epstein was a good idea. Not that I didn’t like the project, but its realization seemed slim.

Many of the people I spoke about it advised me against going deep into Epstein’s affairs. A colleague whom I trusted said that my chances of publishing such a book were nil. Epstein had powerful and influential friends and best litigation lawyers able to thwart anyone writing negatively about him. I was even told a bizarre story about a well-known magazine editor who found an animal head nailed to the door of his upstate cottage after he launched an investigation into the life of the financier Epstein. I treated this episode as a rumor but I was also concerned that leading media outlets generally ignored Epstein’s pedophile past.
It would be disingenuous of me to say that I was not apprehensive about investigating Epstein. My wife was not keen on me getting into the weeds once again after the serious security issues I had over the years while reporting and writing on the Troubles in Ireland. I was also concerned about the scope of the project, the potential cost of the research, and the real possibility of not finding a publisher. Legal readings alone of such a book I knew would be very costly.

Nevertheless, I decided to do what I do best and continued to pry into Epstein’s past. The victims.’ statements were traumatic and harrowing. They convinced me that anyone other than Epstein would have been sitting in jail for decades. He had proved the maxim that if you are white and extremely wealthy in America the Law cannot touch you. In this case Justice had turned a blind eye to the vulnerable and powerless.
Epstein‘s flight logs intrigued me most. It was like working on a complex puzzle, trying to match the first names of girls on the flights to ones listed in the Palm Beach case files. Actually the logs contained little information about the girls, especially on international flights. Making me wonder if a lax immigration system was in place, or Epstein had paid officials to look the other way.

In early 2011, I received a phone call from a very distressed Mrs. A. She was in her Manhattan apartment alone with her dogs when someone using a powerful laser had projected the image of a penis onto her bedroom ceiling. She claimed it was Epstein’s. His victims had described it as a weird, one comparing it to an egg. I had seen a photo of it that had been presented during the Florida trial and it was indeed most grotesque in shape. Mrs. .A said she was too embarrassed to call the FBI. Perhaps she had a nightmare, I suggested. Absolutely not, she insisted. I believed her because it was just too outrageous a story for her to concoct. I had, however, to convince myself that it was technically feasible for someone to do this. I contacted a military source who confirmed that such a laser only existed within the military – industrial complex. It would have meant someone scoping out her building like a sniper to choose the right point from which to deliver the image. It was technically complex but feasible

“This friend of yours must have some powerful enemies,” my source remarked. 
By this time, I was made aware that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell knew that I was on their heels. Mrs. A admitted that a friend of hers had revealed to Epstein her link to me. The same friend told Mrs. A that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were nervous about my interest in them. I decided that it was time to discuss the practicalities of writing the book with Mrs. A. I met her at a home that she and her husband were renting for the summer in the Hamptons.  We talked about the complexity of the project and how it might take more than a year to complete the investigative side of it. It would entail a lot of travel to the places Epstein operated. There would also be legal costs. It was likely no publisher would be eager to finance it, judging from the fact that there was not a single book on Epstein published. I would have to personally finance it.

As she wanted to be part of the project, she needed to talk to her husband and, as a consequence, another meeting took place with him present. He was a very wealthy man. He smoked a Cuban cigar during lunch .Some nervousness was evident in the way his month twitched when he spoke. Like the smart businessman I presumed him to be, he wanted to know the practical hurdles of writing the book, including the eventual blowback that might come from Epstein, or from his powerful team of lawyers and associates. He dwelt on these issues a lot, and it struck me he was not so much worried about my safety as he was about the impact of the book on his social and financial affairs. I told him that it was a book I would not have chosen to write without a publishing contract, but I had amassed enough material to proceed with it. Whether or not he knew, his wife had made clear to me in previous conversations that she wanted the book written on a commission bases. They would finance it and the final product would be theirs. Alternatively, they could act like a publisher and fund the research and writing.

As I was leaving, Mrs. A promised to get back to me within a week with their decision about how they would like to proceed. I had a nagging feeling that her husband was scared of the project and that money would not be a critical element in any decision he might reach. 
A week passed, and then several, without a call from her. I eventually phoned her, and as I had anticipated, they did not wish to be financially involved in the project, but she hoped that I would write the book with her help. It was clear she was committed to the project, but she was not in charge of the purse strings. I believe that her husband was wary of being linked to an expose of Epstein. I gave up the project and returned Mrs. A her box of papers.

The whole experience took up more than a year of my time. By late summer of 2010, I had come to the realization that writing a book on Epstein was a task with too many obstacles. Would I have persisted without being funded properly, I doubt it as I was convinced that I would not have found a willing publisher. Back then, Epstein was Mister Untouchable.
It has taken almost nine years and the tenacity of the journalists at the Miami Herald, especially the excellent reporting of Julie Brown, to tear the cobwebs off the Epstein scandal. The Me Too movement, and the fact that there are more female members of Congress interested in trafficking and sexual abuse of girls and young women, has also helped those investigating Epstein. The public now knows what happened in Palm Beach, Florida and Congress won’t let it be repeated. The fence around J. Epstein is about to come down and some of his associates will seek deals with prosecutors. I am thrilled that the journalists at the Miami Herald proved how important investigative print journalism can be. Such enthusiasm and determination was lacking when I was working alone to expose Epstein’s hideous crimes. His enablers and the powerful friends who knew what he was up didn’t care.

Writers are often asked if they regret not writing a particular book, and whether I should have written the one on Epstein at the time will always trouble me.
There will now be plenty of publishers clamoring for books on Epstein, but I fear he may have taken many of his secrets to the grave. Investigators will be wondering where he hid his personal files, and perhaps videos. If he worked for more than one intelligence agency as some of my sources privately speculate, he will have left little evidence behind of the compromising materials he assembled on some of the world’s most powerful figures. The parallels between his life and Robert Maxwell’s should not be overlooked. There will be many questions asked about his untimely passing and rightly so, just as similar questions were a asked when Maxwell when he vanished off his yacht at night in the middle of the ocean. I suspect that there will be a few scapegoats, too. Ghislaine Maxwell and some of the other insiders in the Epstein fold may well face the rigors of the law as more details emerge of his sexploits across the globe. The big enablers may have the money and the influence to skate freely from the net that will surely close on the weaker fish.

George Mitchell, the US politician widely credited with leading the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, has been named in court papers as being as a confederate of Jeffrey Epstein, and engaging in sex with an underage, 16-year old girl provided to him by Epstein.

The assault is alleged to have happened some three years after Mitchell helped broker the historic 1998 peace settlement in Northern Ireland. He was later asked by President Obama to help settle the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Mitchell, a former majority leader in the US Senate, was named alongside Prince Andrew and a host of well known American figures, as having been provided with the 16-year old girl by Epstein, who committed suicide yesterday in a Manhattan federal holding centre.

Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late, disgraced millionaire British businessman, Robert Maxwell is alleged to have procured the girl for his sex ring.

The then teenager, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who is now in her 30’s, is currently involved in a sensational legal action seeking damages for abuse during her four year ordeal as Epstein’s sex slave. Late last week the first tranche of 2,ooo court documents filed by Giuffre were made public by a US court.

The documents implicate Mitchell and other personalities, including Prince Andrew, in the abuse of Giuffre when she was a sixteen year old working in Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago club in Florida.

She was recruited, allegedly by Ghislaine Maxwell, and spent four years sexually servicing Epstein and his powerful circle of friends before fleeing and hiding out. Mitchell was also named as an Epstein associate by another Epstein employee.

Fox News reported:

In another deposition, Giuffre also reveals that she was “trafficked” to Mitchell, a former Senate Majority leader who represented Maine from 1980-95 and was later named special envoy to the Middle East by President Obama. A sworn affidavit by a former Epstein employee, Juan Alessi, also alleges Mitchell, 85, of having associated with Epstein.

You can read more here.