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.

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