Israel, Blackmail & the Presidents

Sam Husseini reviews the web of connections linking Jeffrey Epstein to Israeli intelligence, U.S. presidents and the current U.S. secretary of state. 

By Sam Husseini
Substack

Just days before Election Day, WikiLeaks reported: “Author of book about the Trump White House, Michael Wolff, claims to have 100 hours of Epstein talking about Trump but releases only a one minute fragment.” 

More along these lines is now atop pages like The Daily Beast with journalistic scoops like “Epstein claiming Trump liked to ‘f—’ his friends’ wives.” 

I didn’t realize until recently that Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar — who Blinken has invoked at high profile events — was not only lawyer and confidant to media mogul and Mossad “super spy” Robert Maxwell but apparently to Jeffrey Epstein himself. 

Robert Maxwell was of course father of Ghislaine Maxwell who was Epstein’s partner in crime.

It has been largely kept from public view and understanding in numerous ways, but there is substantial evidence that the Epstein network was involved in gathering information on political figures from both parties which could be used for blackmail. The molesting of the girls was often apparently the insidious means, not the ultimate goal. The above referenced Daily Beast piece, to take the most recent example, does not contain the word “blackmail.” 

Elizabeth Vos of Consortium News has reported that “Epstein’s death was ruled a ‘suicide’ by New York’s chief medical examiner. A pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said it was homicide.” 

Blinken has a very long relationship with U.S. President Joe Biden. In 2002, he was appointed staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was the chair of the committee and played a critical role in ensuring the invasion. He was Biden’s national security adviser when Biden was vice president. 

Biden has repeatedly displayed a propensity for touching females — including young girls — inappropriately.  

Many have argued that Biden and Blinken have been more supportive of Israeli criminality than any other U.S. administration. What other factors and mechanisms might be at play besides the power of the Israel lobby and alleged strategic imperatives? 

Of course slaughtering thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza overshadows any sexual abuse Epstein and his political associates committed. 

Sarah Kendzior has noted that in addition to Pisar being Maxwell’s lawyer, “after Maxwell died, Pisar became Jeffrey Epstein’s advisor.” She describes Maxwell as an Israeli “superspy” who “socialized with Trump and a variety of Iran-Contra operatives in the 1980s.”

She cites the French outlet Le Parisien which reported in 2019 that Pisar “acted as an intermediary between Epstein” and the law firm representing him.

Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, has reported that “Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s ‘sweetheart’ deal in 2008 and resigned as Donald Trump’s labor secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for ‘intelligence.’” Some have assumed that meant C.I.A., but as Webb has argued, it could well (also) mean Mossad.

Maxwell’s father, Robert, worked with the Mossad according to several books including Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. 

Webb notes:

“In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during his visits to Israel, providing him with prostitutes, [whom] ‘the service maintained for blackmail purposes.’”

See Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas.

Israel used a “honey trap” to lure Mordichai Vanunu who exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal from England to Italy where they kidnapped him.

According to his obit in the Scotsman, “Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991.”

Blinken has had strident pro-Israel positions throughout his career. He was a hawk on Syria while working under Secretary of State John Kerry with a consistent pro war record, and he advanced a myriad of hyper interventionist policies including dividing Iraq.

When I tried to question Biden in 2007 about how he helped make the Iraq invasion possible, Blinken ran interference, lying about the hearings Biden chaired that helped set the stage for the invasion. 

Regarding Pisar, Webb has reported:

“Notably, in the early 1970s, Samuel Pisar told Congress that the world was moving ‘toward a single, unified world economy, in disregard of national frontiers, and even ideological boundaries.’ … Samuel Pisar also represented [Armand] Hammer’s business interests. Hammer notably served as a back channel between the Americans and the Soviets. … Notably, Apple’s Steve Jobs was advised by Samuel Pisar. Jobs later stated that his 1985 trip to the USSR had been ‘facilitated by an international lawyer based in Paris’ and that Jobs had a ‘feeling’ that this attorney ‘worked for the CIA or the KGB.’ That lawyer was almost certainly Pisar.”

There is evidence Israel tried to blackmail other U.S. presidents.

For example, in 2014, the Times of Israel reported: 

“Israel attempted to use tapes of former US president Bill Clinton’s steamy conversations with intern Monica Lewinsky to leverage the release of Jonathan Pollard, a new book on the Clinton family’s political enterprises has claimed. In the book, titled Clinton Inc: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, author Daniel Halper relies on on-the-record interviews with former officials together with a close analysis of documents termed ‘the Monica Files’ to paint a salacious – and uncomplimentary – picture of one of the most prominent political families in the United States.”

Jeffrey Epstein of course was quite connected to both Clinton and Trump. He owned a painting of Clinton in a blue dress, an obvious allusion to Lewinsky’s semen stained dress that proved she had sexual relations with Clinton following his denials.

Clinton would bomb Sudan and Iraq at times that coincided with the impeachment proceedings stemming from his lies about his relationship with Lewinsky. Were those bombings a distraction from his scandals, or were they his doing the bidding of the war state?

(See my piece “Worse than any Payoff” which examines the “Cases of Trump and Clinton: Do presidents bomb other countries to distract from their scandals; or does the ‘Deep State’ effectively use scandals and other mechanisms to push presidents to bomb?”)

Clinton was recently criticized for admonishing Arab Americans in Michigan to vote for Harris. Lewinsky herself just posted her support of Harris.

There are likely other instances in which Israel tried to leverage dirt on U.S. presidents. For example, Ronald Reagan’s second term was overshadowed with the Iran-Contra scandal, which Israel had a role in, see reporting by the late Robert Parry: “How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast”: 

“Ronald Reagan’s neocon aides cleared the way for Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981, shortly after Iran freed 52 U.S. hostages whose captivity doomed [President] Jimmy Carter’s reelection. The move also planted the seeds of the Iran-Contra scandal.”

A second-term scandal-free president may pose a threat to the pro-Israeli establishment.

Interestingly, Parry also reports that Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, would later tell Carter:

“In 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election.”

Presumably the Israelis played ball with the Republicans but the Palestinians didn’t.

Also see my piece “Russiagate’ Was Israelgate.”

(Antony Blinken went to Harvard for his undergraduate degree. After he graduated in 1984, he interned at The New Republic when pro-Israeli diehard Martin Peretz was editor-in-chief. Epstein and his associate Alan Dershowitz are of course also connected to Harvard. Blinken went to the Dalton School in New York City until 1971 when his mother married Pisar and they moved to Paris. Epstein was hired by the Dalton School several years later by former OSS officer Donald Barr, the father of onetime C.I.A. analyst and two time attorney general, Bill Barr. Bill Barr oversaw the Iran-Contra pardons in 1992.) 

In a 2009 profile, The New York Times wrote that Pisar survived Nazi concentration camps

“by becoming pitiless and cruel, finding older protectors and ways to seem privileged in a hierarchy of despair, like persuading a prisoner-tailor to refashion a cap so that the stripes on the top perfectly met the stripes on the side. … Mr. Pisar said he learned that ‘if you followed the law then you were dead.’ He reacted like an animal, he said. ‘I had to learn bad habits, to be good at lying and make instant judgments about people, what they were saying, what they really thought, and not just the guards and torturers, but my fellow prisoners, too,’ he said. ‘I was a cute kid, and there were a lot of psychotics around.’”

Antony Blinken’s grandfather was Maurice Blinken, who founded the American Palestine Institute after World War II. In his New York Times obituary in 1986 the paper reported:

“In 1946, under Mr. Blinken’s direction, the institute initiated and financed a report by several economists, ‘Palestine: Problem and Promise,’ which argued that an independent Jewish state was economically viable.

This rebutted a British white paper that contended Palestine could not economically support a large immigrant population.

The institute’s report is said to have helped persuade the United States Government to support the establishment of the State of Israel.
As Biden and Blinken took office in 2021, Israel had gotten just under $300 billion from the U.S. taxpayer since its founding just in overt economic and military aid. Biden has accelerated that dramatically. The Costs of War Project at Brown University recently estimated the “cost of war in Gaza and beyond to U.S. taxpayers is conservatively estimated to be $22.76 billion.”

Chris Hedges noted when Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced in 2022

“Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard Larry Summers, Stephen Pinker, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, the J.P. Morgan banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell, Harvey Weinstein and many others who were at least present and most likely participated in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia, are not in court. … Epstein’s death in a New York jail cell, while officially ruled a suicide, is in the eyes of many credible investigators a murder.”

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist based near D.C. He is on Twitter: @samhusseini.

This article is from the author’s Substack.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.