Deconstructing Russiagate, Part 5: The Clinton Connection (Section B)

Part 5: The Clinton Connection, Section B

A brief history of the Clintons post-presidential “philanthropic” adventures through the Clinton Foundation quickly defuses the idea that Trump’s presidency posed some unique threat to American “democracy” in the 21st Century. Indeed, if “collusion” with “foreign entities” to manipulate domestic American politics is a crime, the Clintons would perhaps be even more guilty in this respect than Trump. In spite of this, the entirety of “Russiagate” discourse has been framed by the Clintons and the New Democrats they helped create as the reason that Hillary lost the 2016 election. This loss, according to the Russiagate narrative, is what triggered a new period of American reaction. While it is clear that public discourse in the United States has shifted quite far to the Right since the 2016 election, this is, as I will demonstrate later in this series, a phenomena that began long before Trump came along. But according to Russiagaters, it is “the Russians” who “brought” fascism to America, as if it was little more than contraband. 

On the other hand,  reactionaries  who debunk Russiagate as a prelude to their own framing of Trump as a “savior” of their values who is standing up to (and simultaneously neutered by) a “woke” neoliberal deep state, is undercut but Trump’s close friendship with the Clintons and the friendship both maintained with Jeffrey Epstein. As a glance at the Clintons philanthropic network and circle of friends will reveal, if a “neoliberal deep state” exists, it is certainly not “woke” and Trump is not only one of its most cherished assets, but is one of its greatest managers. Let us begin our analysis with the Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton Foundation was technically started while Bill was still president in 1997: “There were vague plans for future international charity work. But the nonprofit focused mainly on Little Rock, where Clinton was planning a library and a graduate school of public service, and envisioning an urban renaissance for the city that nurtured his political career. So the famously obsessive Clinton obsessed some more about buildings in Little Rock.” After Bill left the White House in 2001, the Clinton Foundation remained a Little Rock entity for some years. However, Bill’s ambitions “began to expand after he — and the fledgling foundation — moved into offices in Harlem, in the state where Hillary Clinton had just been elected senator.” It should be mentioned that Hillary’s senatorial campaign in New York owed part of its success to Donald Trump’s patronage, which also flowed to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee for ten years to the tune of $125,000. “Overall, Trump has given nearly $600,000 to New York state campaigns, with more than two-thirds going to Democrats.” For many years, Trump even donated handsomely to his future “arch enemy” John McCain “whom Trump first supported in 1998.”

By 2002, the Clinton Foundation was overseeing a small business mentorship project in Harlem with help from the infamous consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Founded in 1914, Booz Allen Hamilton had “served three-fourths of the country’s largest businesses, two-thirds of the federal government’s departments, and most types of nonprofit institutions” in its first five decades alone. During the 1960s the firm undertook “a series of assignments for the World Bank to help the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela develop steel industries. Moreover, Booz Allen was hired by the Algerian government to help it develop an integrated oil operation which could operate in the world marketplace; similar assignments soon followed in Iran, Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia.” The firm also worked for Robert McNamara in Vietnam and ultimately became the largest consulting business in the world, expanding into transportation, household chemicals, airport management, real estate, market research, and television advertising. Throughout the 1980s, Booz Allen Hamilton, engaged in oil and steel industry work in West Africa, Indonesia, and Nigeria, while also working in Zambia “to help consolidate that country’s copper mining industry.” In 1993, the firm, “was hired by the US Agency for International Development to devise a strategy to lead a consortium of firms in the privatization of civilian and defense industries in 11 newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.” 

In other words, Booz Allen Hamilton became a pillar of American capitalism and its neo-colonial adventures in the Third World during and immediately after the Cold War. It should thus come as no surprise that in 2008, after six years of working with the Clinton Foundation, Booz Allen Hamilton was absorbed by the Carlyle Group for $2.54 billion. The Carlyle Group is a private equity firm founded by former Jimmy Carter staffer David Rubenstein and Stephen Norris in 1987. Two years later, former Reagan Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci became Carlyle’s chairman. The firm also onboarded William Barr at the same time that he was working with Robert Mueller to cover up the BCCI and Inslaw scandals.

In the 1990s, Carlyle also brought on billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros.. At the time, Carlyle was looking to raise $500 million, and had acquired the first $150 million from some banks, pension funds, and Richard K. Mellon and Sons (it should be noted that the Mellon family, along with the Coors, Olins, and Kochs, were massive financial contributors to the New Right. In fact, Richard Mellon Scaife was a part of the same aforementioned CIA media psyop that tapped Rupert Murdoch to produce Reagan era propaganda). Soros, fresh off a massive shorting scheme that destroyed the value of the British pound, not only lent the firm another $100 million but helped it gain additional investments and contracts with high level operators. As Briody writes:

“Investments were pouring in from the likes of American Airlines, Gannett, Citibank, and others. By the winter of 1994, the fund had already reached $400 million, and the target was raised to $650 million. Then in the fall of 1995, the goal was again raised, this time to $750 million. The money was starting to pile up. The Carlyle Group had everyone from Soros to Colin Powell helping them out, talking to investors, and opening wallets.

In Carlyle’s previous fund, Carlyle Partners I, the defense investments Carlyle had made in the late 1980s were finally starting to cash out in the mid-1990s, and the payment was handsome. The company took a $38 million investment in Vought Aircraft in 1992, turned the company around, then sold it to Northrop Grumman just two years later for $130 million. Word got around quickly that Carlyle had the best game in town. Rumors of 46 percent annual rates of return had investors salivating. Members of the bin Laden family were in for untold millions. The state of Florida was in for $200 million. And the California Public Employees’ Retirement System

(CalPERS) was in for $80 million. By the time Carlyle Partners II closed in September 1996, the fund had raised more than $1.3 billion, 13 times the size of the company’s first fund, and more than twice the anticipated amount…Names like Aerostructures Corp., United

Defense, United States Marine Repair, and U.S. Investigations Services dominated the list of investments. And most of them had one thing in common: They depended on government contracts to make a living…

…By the fall of 1997… the company had George Bush Sr. casually working for them on and off as a ‘senior advisor.’ (Bush and Rubenstein had become very close friends at this point.) So it wasn’t difficult to hook former U.K. Prime Minister John Major, as well…By the end of the decade, Carlyle stood with more than a dozen funds and close to $10 billion under management. It was officially a juggernaut, and the world was taking notice. The company was hiring politicians from all over the world to further their cause: former president of the Philippines Fidel Ramos; Prime Minister of South Korea Park Tae-joon; former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt. And, of course, George Bush Sr.”

An article published in The Guardian just one month after 9/11 noted that “For 14 years now, with almost no publicity, the company has been signing up an impressive list of former politicians – including the first President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker; John Major; one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi and several south-east Asian power brokers – and using their contacts and influence to promote the group. “As The Guardian notes “since the start of the ‘war on terrorism’…Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current president’s father. And, until earlier this month, Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm’s multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama bin Laden.” 

Thus, by the time Carlyle bought out Booz Allen Hamilton, both firms had made a name for themselves within the context of post-Cold War neoliberal globalization. Only five years after the Carlyle buyout, Booz Allen Hamilton, whose name was by then tied to the controversy over the NSA’s PRISM surveillance apparatus (a direct descendent of the Iran-Contra era PROMIS), would be caught giving politicians in both parties upwards of $80,000, securing a future stream of government contracts. As for the bin Laden connection, that was just a matter of Carlyle and Booz Allen Hamilton’s deeper connections to the Saudi Monarchy:

“A source close to the Saudi government says that the royal family viewed investing in the Carlyle Group as a way to show gratitude to President Bush for defending the Saudis in the Gulf War. ‘George Bush or James Baker would meet with all the big guys in the royal family,’ the source says. ‘Indirectly, the message was ‘I’d appreciate it if you put some money in the Carlyle Group.’

According to The Washington Post, Prince Bandar was among those who invested. In 1995 the bin Ladens joined in. Khalid bin Mahfouz’s sons Abdulrahman and Sultan became investors as well, according to family attorney Cherif Sedky. Abdulrahman bin Mahfouz was a director of the Muwafaq Foundation, which has been designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as ‘an al-Qaeda front’…In all, Carlyle officials say that the Saudis have invested $80 million in the firm. It is unclear how much of that was raised following meetings attended by former president George Bush or James Baker. The bin Ladens put $2 million in the Carlyle Partners II Fund, a relatively small sum that was said to be part of a larger package. One family member, Shafig bin Laden, was attending an investor conference held by the Carlyle Group in Washington on September 11, 2001.” 

On the other hand, Booz Allen Hamilton has trained the Saudi Navy for years as part of a US government program to help allied militaries. Furthermore, “Dozens of American military veterans work for Booz Allen in Saudi Arabia. One retired rear admiral with combat experience in the region advises top Saudi officers on military planning. Others have extensive shipboard experience that could be used to train Saudis on how to carry out blockades and how to operate equipment like electronic warfare gear that can detect and interfere with enemy radars and missiles…Booz Allen also advises the Saudi Army; it won a contract to help with logistics, including maintaining the Saudis’ Abrams tanks.” 

With Booz Allen’s status as not only one of the first firms to collaborate with the Clinton Foundation but also a consistent donor to it, it should come as no surprise that the Foundation also receives a massive amount of financial support from the Saudi Royals and bourgeoisie.  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is listed in the “Donations from $10,000,001 to $25,000,000” bracket of the Clinton Foundation’s official donor list. According to the New York TImes, “At least $1 million more was donated by Friends of Saudi Arabia, which was co-founded by a Saudi prince.” Another million dollars came from Nasser Al-Rashid, a Saudi businessman with close ties to the Saudi royals. Funnily enough, the Open Society Institute, created by George Soros while he was still a member of the Carlyle Group, gave between $1,000,001-$5,000,000 ( the George Soros Foundation is also present, sitting comfortably in the $500,000-$1,000,00 bracket).

Speaking of the donor list, in the $5,000,001-$10,000,000 range was the Wasserman Foundation, created by Murder Inc. gangster and major Reagan mentor Lew Wasserman. Joining the Wasserman Foundation in that bracket is Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul and business partner of Rupert Murdoch. Just before his death Wasserman joined with Mega Group members Edgar M. Bronfman, Les Wexner, and Ronald S. Lauder (whose family has been friends and business partners with the Trumps and Roy Cohn for 30 years) and commodities trading criminal Marc Rich to donate $70-million to Birthright Israel, a non-profit organization founded by Charles Bronfman, who, like his brother Epstein, comes from the same crime circle as Wasserman, and Michael Steinhardt, who sits on the board of Genie Energy with Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, and Epstein friend Larry Summers. The donation to Birthright Israel came just after Marc Rich was controversially pardoned at the tail end of Bill Clinton’s presidential administration. 

Additionally, Haim Saban has collaborated on numerous projects with Sheldon Adelson, one of the key players in Trump’s supposedly “Russian controlled” 2016 campaign,with Saban saying he and Adelson were “absolutely on the same page” regarding Israel. One such project was the formation of a Zionist lobby group. Much like the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (which Adelson and Saban were also donors to) the duo’s Israeli-American Council was a bipartisan affair, with an “‘Inaugural National Conference’ headlined by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former Democratic senator…Joseph Lieberman.” 

This is rather curious considering the respective political trajectories of the Israeli-American Council’s co-founders. In the 1998 election cycle, Saban was ranked the 155th greatest individual donor to the Democratic Party; just two years later, he had risen to 5th place and later became the “largest overall contributor to the Democratic National Committee during the 2001–2002 cycle.” Despite this, Saban has also donated to the GOP, including a contribution to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. Perhaps this is when he and Sheldon Adelson got the idea to collaborate, as the latter billionaire had a firm foothold in the GOP by Bush Jr.s second term: “By the mid-2000s, [Adelson’s] political giving — he and his wife each donated $250,000 toward President George W. Bush’s second inauguration — had won him a personal audience with the White House. In an October 2007…Adelson pressured Bush to get Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to back off pursuing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Bush responded by telling Adelson and his wife not to worry about Rice’s pursuit because “at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s…” Indeed, if one wants to speak of “foreign influence in American elections” Adelson should be listed, as he was the first person to spend $70 million to sway a Presidential election, clearly in the name of his beloved settler-colonial apartheid state. 

So far, we’ve seen the Clinton Foundations coffers filled by foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Trump himself donated “at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, despite his criticism of the foundation’s dealings…Likewise, his daughter Ivanka Trump is listed as having given somewhere between $5,001 and $10,000.” Jeffrey Epstein also donated to the Clinton Foundation: “His former charity, the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, donated $25,000 to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charity, according to C.O.U.Q.’s 2006 tax return. The group is listed among past and present donors on the Clinton Foundation’s website.” But one donation is truly beyond irony: Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin itself. Indeed, in 2016, the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton herself briefly came under fire for “Russian ties” (before Trump was the sole person capable of being a “Russian puppet”) in the same mainstream media: 

“Consider Skolkovo, an ‘innovation city’ of 30,000 people on the outskirts of Moscow, billed as Russia’s version of Silicon Valley—and a core piece of Mrs. Clinton’s quarterbacking of the Russian reset…The Kremlin committed $5 billion over three years to fund Skolkovo. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department worked aggressively to attract U.S. investment partners and helped the Russian State Investment Fund, Rusnano, identify American tech companies worthy of Russian investment. Rusnano, which a scientific adviser to President Vladimir Putin called ‘Putin’s child,’ was created in 2007 and relies entirely on Russian state funding…

…Soon, dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel and Cisco , made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco committing a cool $1 billion. In May 2010, the State Department facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital—and weeks later the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies.

By 2012 the vice president of the Skolkovo Foundation, Conor Lenihan —who had previously partnered with the Clinton Foundation—recorded that Skolkovo had assembled 28 Russian, American and European “Key Partners.” Of the 28 “partners,” 17, or 60%, have made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton.

Russians tied to Skolkovo also flowed funds to the Clinton Foundation. Andrey Vavilov, the chairman of SuperOx, which is part of Skolkovo’s nuclear-research cluster, donated between $10,000 and $25,000 (donations are reported in ranges, not exact amounts) to the Clinton’s family charity. Skolkovo Foundation chief and billionaire Putin confidant Viktor Vekselberg also gave to the Clinton Foundation through his company, Renova Group…Even if it could be proven that these tens of millions of dollars in Clinton Foundation donations by Skolkovo’s key partners played no role in the Clinton State Department’s missing or ignoring obvious red flags about the Russian enterprise, the perception would still be problematic. (Neither the Clinton campaign nor the Clinton Foundation responded to requests for comment.) What is known is that the State Department recruited and facilitated the commitment of billions of American dollars in the creation of a Russian ‘Silicon Valley’ whose technological innovations include Russian hypersonic cruise-missile engines, radar surveillance equipment, and vehicles capable of delivering airborne Russian troops.” 

Obviously the alarmist tone of this article is not warranted, but the fact remains that the Clinton Foundation and Hillary dealt directly with Putin’s government and the Russian oligarchy in such a way that, had it been Trump’s deal, would have been more than enough “evidence” to “prove” “collusion” with Russia. And they don’t stop at the “Russian Silicon Valley” either. Remember Uranium One? This 2015 article from the New York Times (which would become one of the primary venues for Russiagate) sure does:

“At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.” 

Now again, this is all business as usual for the international bourgeoisie, and you could only find it “scary” if you’re either totally naive about how the global circulation of capital and contingent geopolitical formations are developed or you’re trying to frighten those who are. But the point is, if it had been Trump, we would have never heard the end of it. Instead, we heard a series of half-truths, embellishments and straight up lies that were cyclically phased out of the news cycle upon each being exposed as such. And speaking of news stories that were quickly forgotten, exactly why is it that everyone seems to have memory-holed the closeness of the Clintons, the Trumps, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell before the 2016 election? For instance:

“Clinton appeared as a passenger on flight logs for Epstein’s fleet of aircraft no less than 26 times between February 2002 and November 2003. One of Epstein’s pilots, David Rodgers, gave a deposition in 2016 as part of a defamation case that Roberts brought against Maxwell. In his testimony he referred to his pilot’s log book entries. They seemed to indicate that on at least two occasions Rodgers had flown Clinton and the duke in one of Epstein’s aircraft.

The pilot added that in February 2002, on a flight from Miami to New York on the Boeing known as the ‘Lolita Express’, his passengers had included Clinton, four Secret Service agents, Epstein, Maxwell and ‘Prince Andrew’. Rodgers added: ‘I have a picture of me and the crew with Bill Clinton on the plane…To the best of my knowledge it was the first time that we had flown him’.

He said in July 2002 he had flown from Morocco to New York with Epstein, Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Clinton, Doug Band (Clinton’s right-hand man) and ‘probably nine Secret Service people’ aboard…

…When [Epstein] was charged with fresh paedophile offences in 2019, Clinton’s office issued this statement: ‘In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane: one to Europe, one to Asia and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.’

One of the trips to Africa saw Epstein — whose Gratitude America charity donated to the Clinton Foundation, IRS records show — travelling with Clinton and the disgraced actor Kevin Spacey. The double Oscar-winner subsequently saw his career ended over multiple allegations of sexual assault against boys and young men.” 

British socialite Lady Victoria Hervey told the BBC how Bill Clinton was “very close to Jeffrey” and that the two were “like brothers.” At the same time, Ghislaine Maxwell, “first grew close with the Clintons after Bill Clinton left office, vacationing on a yacht with Chelsea Clinton in 2009, attending her wedding in 2010, and participating in the Clinton Global Initiative as recently as 2013, years after her name first emerged in accounts of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse.” As mentioned earlier, Epstein and Ghislaine were also good friends with Trump and that his closest friends, such as Roy Cohn, exemplified by organizations such as the Mega Group. 

In an interview two weeks after Robert Maxwell, a member of the Mega Group, mysteriously died, Trump told Larry King:“He was a character and a colorful guy, and I think we were lucky to have seen even a short time of him in New York. He was my kind of a guy.” Trump had the same attitude towards Ghislaine. (One survivor of the Maxwell-Epstein rape ring has gone on the record that, at age 14, she was personally introduced to Trump by Ghislaine). Furthermore, Trump and Epstein were also “like brothers”:  “For the better part of two decades starting in the late 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump swam in the same social pool. They were neighbors in Florida. They jetted from LaGuardia to Palm Beach together. They partied at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and dined at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.”

Trump has said of Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Ignoring the obvious reference to Epstein’s proclivity for raping underage girls, we can see that Trump and Epstein’s relationship probably started sometime in 1985 or 1986. Even if Trump’s estimation is off by a year or two, this would perhaps explain why Epstein jumped from working for Donald Barr at Dalton to hooking up with the Bronfmans then becoming part of the Mega Group circle and acquiring large swathes of Les Wexner’s estate. It would probably also have something to do not only with William Barr becoming Trump’s Attorney General, but with former US Attorny for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta, who allowed Epstein to get off easy when he was first arrested for running his rape operation in 2006-2008, becoming Trump’s Secretary of Labor. 

Epstein owned a house in Palm Beach, Florida two miles from Mar-a-Lago. At the time, Epstein was working with Andrew Levander, who was then an assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Levander was working for Spanish heiress Ana Obregon to recover her father’s fortune when Obregon brought in Epstein, who’d started a “consulting firm”, to help him. As TrueHoop notes: “Levander would go on to become one of the most successful white-collar defense attorneys in the country, and eventually chairman of the respected international firm Dechert.” When billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Black was forced to step down as CEO of Apollo Global for his business and personal relationship to Epstein, he requested that Apollo allow Dechert to conduct an “independent investigation.” Levander, who apparently failed to disclose his own history with Epstein, concluded that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on Black’s part. Black has gone on the record that he has mutual friends with Steve Bannon and “a personal” relationship with Jared Kushner and with Ivanka Trump. He also spoke of a “business transaction” between Apollo and Kushner Companies, but claims he had no knowledge of the deal until after the fact. In November 2017, after Joshua Harris, Black’s partner, met numerous times in the White House with Kushner, Apollo lent Kushner Companies $184 million to refinance a Chicago skyscraper.

Through his consulting firm, Epstein also worked for Towers Financial which its founder, Steven J. Hoffenberg, now admits was a ponzi scheme. When asked why Epstein didn’t also go to prison for Towers Financial, Hoffenberg claimed that, “He was needed by the CIA or the FBI for intelligence, because he was manipulating the American intelligence for the overseas organizations: MI6, the Israelis, and the Saudi’s. That’s what he was doing. They were afraid of the exposure that he brought to the table for what he did with Prince Andrew, MI6, the Israelis, and the Saudi’s.” 

There is no smoking gun to prove this, but Epstein did have a few connections to Israel. First, he was close with not just Les Wexner, but also the Bronfman family, both of whom helped start the Mega Group along with Ronald Lauder, another old friend of Trump and Cohn. Second, a profile in New York Magazine featuring Epstein’s friendship with public relations expert Howard Rubenstein (who saved Trump’s image after his divorce from Ivana in the 90s) notes that “Epstein’s two big charitable causes are science and Israel.” There is also a strange trip to the UK Epstein took with German entrepreneur Nicole Junkermann in 2002, where the pair met two unknown US senators at a property owned by Les Wexner in a secluded rural area where numerous members of the British bourgeoisie and government keep a home.. It’s unknown exactly what the purpose of this meeting was, but one possible answer can be found in a study commissioned by the Wexner Foundation just before the start of the Iraq War. As Bob Fitrakis wrote in 2003: 

“We can only imagine Limited founder and apparel magnate Leslie Wexner’s consternation over the leaking of a document entitled, Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communication Priorities 2003. The report was prepared for the Wexner Foundation and provides insight into Wexner’s relationship with the state of Israel…Frank Lutz, the Republican Party pollster and spin doctor, prepared the Wexner Analysis. Lutz’s report essentially outlines a political PR campaign ‘as the post-war dust settles over the Iraqi desert’…the Wexner Analysis emphasizes that ‘now is the time to link American success in dealing with terrorism and dictators from a position of strength to Israel’s ongoing efforts to eradicate terrorism on and within its borders.’

Lutz, realizing the value of an Arab bogeymen, stresses that ‘Saddam Hussein’ are the two words that tie Israel to America and are most likely to deliver support in Congress. The day we allow Saddam to take his eventual place in the trash heap of history is the day we lose our strongest weapon in the linguistic defense of Israel.

In the ‘Essential Conclusion’ section of the report, Lutz offers 10 recommendations. The first is: ‘Iraq colors all. Saddam is your best defense, even if he is dead. For a year – a SOLID YEAR – you should be invoking the name of Saddam Hussein and how Israel was always behind American efforts to rid the world of this ruthless dictator and liberate their people.’”

Epstein and Junkermann would later team up with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to  form a limited partnership named Sum (EB). Sum (EB)’s sole purpose was to invest in Carbyne, a surveillance and “emergency response” startup founded in 2014 by Amir Elichai, “a former Israeli army officer who served in a different positions in the special elite forces and the intelligence corps.” The company also received investment from Peter Thiel through his Founders Fund. The Carbyne board of directors features Pinhas Buchris, the former director of Unit 8200, a secretive division of Israeli military intelligence that has been described as a tech startup machine that has a direct pipeline to Silicon Valley. Another investor in Carbyne is Michael Cohen, Trump’s disgraced former attorney. The firm has also received investment from former Iraq War bureaucrat and head of the CIA David Petraues.  On Carbyne’s advisory board sits Kirsten Nielsen, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security and  Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security. There’s also Bush Jr. FEMA director Robert David Paulison, along with Kevin Brock, assistant director of the FBI under Robert Mueller  and Trae Stephens, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund. 

Carbyne’s co-founder, Lital Leshem, also happens to be the director of Frontier Resource Group, a private equity firm started by Erik Prince, who  founded the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater (which, ever since its infamous war crimes in Iraq, including child murder, has changed its name three times). As Lital Leshem writes on her website, she and Erik Prince, “joined forces to found COMframe, a company that takes the best of Israeli defense technology providers, and helps them penetrate the American market by bridging prevalent gaps.” Prince is the brother of Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, with both belonging to the DeVos family, the creators of the Amway pyramid scheme and crucial nodes in the Koch network. None of this necessarily proves that Epstein is an agent of either the Mossad or the CIA, but by the turn of the 21st century he’d clearly developed a deeper relationship to the bourgeoisie of Western nations than many realize.

But to circle back to Trump, while he was still close with Epstein, he was also a dear friend of the Clintons. In addition to donating to Hillary’s senatorial campaign, the campaigns of various Clinton-aligned “New Democrats” and the Clinton Foundation, Trump also invited Bill and Hillary to his 2005, wich the Clintons attended. Three years later, in an interview with CNN, Trump dismissed the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “totally unimportant” and the GOP attempt to impeach Bill Clinton as “nonsense.”  Bill Clinton, during his own interview with CNN in 2012, at the height of Trump accusing Obama of being born in Kenya, defended his friend saying, “I like him. And I love playing golf with him.” In turn, Trump told Fox News that he thought Bill was, “a really good guy.” The two had played golf together for at least ten years at that point, with Clinton having a locker at the Trump National Golf Club, sitting only six miles away from the Clintons’ New York residence. 

Also in 2012, at the height of the Benghazi outrage, Trump told Fox News: “Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman. I am biased because I have known her for years. I live in New York. She lives in New York. I really like her and her husband both a lot. I think she really works hard. And I think, again, she’s given an agenda, it is not all of her, but I think she really works hard and I think she does a good job. I like her.” A year later, during an interview with Larry King, Trump said, “They’re members of my club, and I like both of them very much, and he was with you one time and he said he likes me and I do like him.” Throughout their entire friendship, the Clintons and the Trumps only lived about 5 miles away from one another.