How Russia turned Epstein against Israel

Everyone, joining me today is the author of a groundbreaking and, I think, really important book, and I think you’ll agree with me when you see the title of this book. David Reaboi is a political commentator and the author of—let me just get up the front cover so you can see it—The Epstein Conspiracy, a new book: How Russia Turned a Lie About Jeffrey Epstein Into a Weapon Against America, Israel and Jews. I think you can now purchase this book online on Amazon. David is also the president of Strategic Improvisation, which is a communications company focused on developing strategies for national security. And he’s also written a book about Qatar’s malign influence in America and the West. David, thanks so much for joining J-TV today.

It’s a pleasure.

Gosh, so much to talk about. This whole Epstein thing, the conspiracies and how it’s tied to Mossad and Israel, it’s just become so almost normalized now. I kind of feel like it’s become the modern day equivalent of the Rothschild conspiracy theories or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this idea that Jews are secretly pulling all the strings controlling world events. Is that how you see it? And is that what kind of motivated you to write this?

Well, for sure. First of all, thank you for having me. What I believe it is, is the Russians taking advantage of what has been the largest story in the universe for many years, which is the Epstein story. They take advantage of that to slipstream their own agenda into it and use it towards their ends in terms of their foreign policy goals, which is to move the United States and Israel far away from one another. And the other thing is really to encourage conspiracism. Let’s say to encourage malign, insane conspiracism, which is really the same thing.

The Russians are very aware. They have been very aware for many years that conspiracism makes people crazy. It breaks down the ability of people to think clearly and to understand the world around them. When, for example, you are led to believe that the United States is controlled by a bunch of shadowy forces in Jerusalem, then all the issues in politics just fall away.

They’re not important. The only important thing becomes, hey, let’s root out these demons who are actually running the country. And once you do that to a certain number of people, then what you get is a politics in freefall. You get a society that is kind of ripping itself apart. One of the things that I’ve said for a long time is that Americans, for some reason, believe that they are immune to the conspiratorial mental patterns of places like Yemen or Egypt or Pakistan or what have you. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think we are immune at all. And once we go down paths like that, it’s sort of bad news for everyone, not just Jews.

Fascinating. One of the central arguments that people make for the whole Epstein alleged Israeli intelligence connections is that he was close to former prime minister Ehud Barak and Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, who have long been accused as working for Mossad. What do you make of that evidence, and why do you not find it convincing?

Well, we can take them separately, because those are two kind of big pieces of supposed evidence that they throw. On the matter of Ehud Barak, we know from the emails, and we know from just in general their relationship, what that was. That was Barak leaving government and wanting to find some rich people to help him make some money after serving in government for many decades. That’s what the record shows. That’s what the recordings show. That’s what the emails show. But aside from that, can you imagine the United States sending a former president to, what, to be the handler of a CIA spy somewhere in the world? Is that a thing that makes any sense to anybody? It just makes no sense. It’s far too… I don’t know, to me it’s farcical.

The second thing, in regards to Robert and Ghislaine Maxwell, that’s really where my book comes in, because in my book I trace the “Epstein was Mossad” lie to a guy named Ari Ben-Menashe. Ari Ben-Menashe is a former Israeli intelligence official, not Mossad, but a guy who is one of the most shady guys really that’s been around in the 20th and 21st centuries.

He popped up right after Epstein’s death and he said, “Yeah, Epstein was Mossad. He was running a blackmail operation together with Robert Maxwell and Ghislaine, and I knew them and I was there.” Of course, he didn’t say anything while Epstein was alive, but as soon as he was dead, he felt safe to come forward.

Well, the interesting thing is that Ari Ben-Menashe ran exactly the same operation, almost verbatim, on Robert Maxwell 30 years ago. He popped up in a book by Seymour Hersh alleging that Maxwell was Mossad.

And there was really no evidence for this. Maxwell’s links to several intelligence agencies, from MI6 to the KGB to Mossad: he had links to all of them, but he was primarily known for decades as being a KGB asset. And up pops Ari Ben-Menashe to say, oh, okay, this guy was Mossad, or this guy is Mossad. Within two weeks of that allegation exploding, in 1991, Robert Maxwell dies. And the libel suit that he promised to launch against Seymour Hersh and Ben-Menashe and the publisher dies with him.

So Ben-Menashe spent the next several years, and then really several decades, making sure that everyone believes that Maxwell was Mossad. What did he do? He served as the source in several different books. Once the books were published, they took on a life of their own.

What would have been motivating him? Well, a number of things. First of all, there was an intercepted KGB directive that said, right after Maxwell’s death, “Whatever we do, we need to…”

No, I’m sorry, it was before Maxwell’s death: “Whatever we do, we need to cover up Maxwell’s links to the KGB.” So here up pops Ben-Menashe, who very helpfully points the world away from Maxwell’s KGB links and towards his alleged Mossad links. And this hardens into conventional wisdom. There are several books on this. And if you go to Wikipedia right now, it’s true. It’s true because it’s been in books, and then the books have been translated into Wikipedia and all these places, and then it becomes conventional wisdom.

So when Epstein died, the only thing that Ben-Menashe really had to do was show up and link him to Maxwell. What I do in the book is I show exactly how this is done. Really what it’s called is source laundering, which is you take a source which may be shady or untrustworthy or sketchy in some way, and then you proliferate them so that it makes it appear to be coming from different places. Ben-Menashe did exactly that when it came to Maxwell, and then he did exactly that when it came to Epstein. All the most authoritative, let’s say, sources that people use to establish that Epstein was Mossad, it all traces back to Ari Ben-Menashe.

And Ari Ben-Menashe, what has he been doing lately? In the last 30 years, he became a lobbyist, but not really a lobbyist. He became an information operator for warlords, mostly in Africa but not exclusively, who have dealings in some way with the Wagner Group and with the Russian government. So he is hired to make up fake stories about his enemies, or the enemies of a random pro-Russia warlord somewhere in Africa. And then he goes away. This is how he’s made a living for the last several decades.

And in my mind, I don’t think it’s too far to reach to say that this is a Russian information operation. Because you have Ben-Menashe, who is a guy who is known to be working for and with the Russians. As soon as he pops up, you have the entire state media of Russia amplify and push this narrative very hard.

It’s interesting to remember that when Epstein died in his prison cell, what was everyone talking about? Everyone was making a joke that it was the Clintons that did it. It was Hillary—“Epstein didn’t kill himself,” with a picture of Hillary—and that was the joke, not a joke.

And then all of a sudden that shifted, and that’s completely gone. That was replaced by Epstein supposedly being Mossad. And that replacement happened as soon as Epstein died, but it took a little while to percolate. In the same way that the Maxwell stuff took a little while to percolate and to seed and to plant and to grow, the Mossad lie did the same.

And it finally was activated the week of, or let’s say the week after, the 12-day war with Israel, which is kind of an interesting thing: you see a whole bunch of American podcasters screaming about Jeffrey Epstein being Mossad, really out of nowhere, at the precise moment that Israel was able to clean Iran’s clock.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Yeah, well, it’s created the foundation, the leverage to make the false narrative that Israel is the puppet master of America. I want to get to the Russia connection in a moment. But before we do, what would you say is the biggest piece of evidence that the conspiracy theorists utilize to create this Epstein-Mossad connection, and why do you find it to be flawed? Well, it’s a tricky question, because what is the best evidence that they have, or what is the best evidence that they think they have?

Part of the problem here is that social media has made people stupid and crazy. For example, when my book came out, I had allegedly reasonable, intelligent people coming back to me and saying, no, your book is nonsense because here’s a photo of Epstein wearing an IDF T-shirt. And I was like, is that evidence for anything? Or how about when they say, oh, here’s an email that Epstein sent saying that he represents the Rothschilds. It’s like, okay, you have an email. Did you look into it?

Did you check if Epstein was just puffing himself up and speaking nonsense? Did he actually work for the Rothschilds? Is that something that he was lying about, or is that something that’s true? And if he did work for the Rothschilds, does that mean that he works for the Israeli state, or Israeli intelligence? These connections need to be made.

But a lot of people who are kind of in this conspiratorial zone, they don’t actually make the connections. They think that just saying, hey, look, he’s wearing an IDF T-shirt is enough. I don’t think that’s the kind of evidence people use when they’re living their own lives. And I don’t think it’s the kind of evidence that is acceptable in sort of figuring out what’s true or what’s not in the world of espionage.

So they come back and they say, well, his relationship to Robert Maxwell, and Robert Maxwell we know is Mossad. And then I say, well, actually, you don’t know that he was Mossad, because that rumor was started by the same guy who started the Epstein rumor.

But a lot of people, unfortunately, just are not dealing with evidence in a… I don’t even want to say a sophisticated way, but an acceptable way. So that’s what it is. But aside from that, there’s really no evidence. There’s really no evidence. And if some evidence pops up, then we’ll have to adjudicate it the way it’s normally done, by law enforcement or by lawyers.

One of the things that I wanted to do when doing this book, because obviously I’m doing a book about conspiracy theory: the last thing I want is to sound like I’m a conspiracy theorist myself. So in order to avoid that trap, what I did was I went back and I found the authoritative method for how information operations are attributed. And that was done in the 1980s primarily by a small, kind of half government, half not group called the Active Measures Working Group. It was an amazing collection of folks, and they sat down and they were like, okay, we know that the KGB is active and they’re spreading lies, weaponized lies, in order to affect either change in policy or something else in the United States. What are the methods that we’re going to use in order to show that this is a thing that’s happening?

Because the nature of information operations is that you’re not going to have an email, or a piece of paper, or a video, or anything saying, hey, yes, we did it. This is exactly what we did. Let me explain it to you.

So instead of that, the Active Measures Working Group came up with kind of three criteria. And I think these three criteria can be used by anyone, and they should be used by anyone, when trying to figure out who is behind some information operation or political warfare or something.

The first thing is to take into account the strategic interest of the country, because whatever they’re doing should be in furtherance of that strategic interest. The second one is, let’s say, a signature, like a technical signature. So, for example, source laundering: how they do the thing that they do. Is it something that is familiar over the course of several different campaigns by, in this case, the Russians?

And the third point is the cast of characters. Are we looking at people who pop up all the time in pro-Russia information operations? And in this case, we absolutely are. So I have a chapter in the book where I kind of go through that, and I say this is why I believe that I’m on firm ground when I point the finger at the Russians.

Wow. I want to speak a bit more about the Russians in a moment.

But given that, as you say, there really is no evidence there, meaningful evidence for an Epstein-Mossad connection, I was really quite stunned—well, actually, to be honest, not so stunned once I saw a pattern of this now—but to see the vice president, J.D. Vance, go on the Joe Rogan podcast and basically suggests that it’s obvious in his mind that Epstein was Mossad or CIA or a bit of both agent. And to say that as the vice president, use the authority of the vice president, which he should be smart enough to know all the connotations that this conspiracy theory has and how it propels this dark, sinister force of anti-Semitism.

And the reason I say I’m not so surprised about it is because we just made a documentary on our J-TV+ platform called “The Troubling Transformation of J.D. Vance”. Viewers can just check that out if they go to j-tv.plus, where I line up and go through the whole series of times I’ve seen over the past two years where I felt that the vice president, to my great lament, has been giving nods and winks to the woke right, to the people that are pushing all this stuff.

As I say in the film, when moral clarity was cheap, he chose not to spend it and instead to give that nod and a wink to the woke right. So I just wondered, before we talk about Russia, your thoughts on the vice president’s things? Because I’m sure many people will turn around, they’ll say to you, if the vice president’s saying that, he must know something that you don’t.

Well, the vice president is a conspiracy theorist. And I kind of came up with a term, it hasn’t really caught on because it’s a little complex, to describe people like him, which is rapid onset elite right-wing social media retardation. I think what’s happened is that the vice president surrounds himself in chat groups and with people who are all on a radicalization path together. And what that ends up doing over time is it creates a silo that’s kind of hermetically sealed, and everyone kind of assumes that, okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. And then they go on to the next thing.

And that means they very rarely encounter counter arguments. And just to add for one second, if he discovered some kind of information, evidence to give back into that, then he has a duty to share that with the American public.

Well, of course he does, but he didn’t. And he admits to Rogan that he didn’t. He just says, “Well, I have no evidence. They would have destroyed it by now anyway.” Which is so irresponsible, because it’s absolutely a get out of jail free card. It’s, “I have no evidence. I believe it. Why do I believe it? Just because I believe it.” And I don’t think that’s acceptable when it comes to this issue, because this is such a fundamental issue in terms of just getting people to distrust.

It’s one thing to get people to distrust the government when you say, oh, the government always screws up, or the government is full of ideologues who sometimes do bad things, or it’s corrupt, or it’s this or it’s that. All these things can be taken care of and dealt with, or should be.

But what he’s saying is something that’s a lot bigger than that. And frankly, it’s a lot more dangerous than that. Because if he’s the vice president of the United States and he’s saying that this stuff was hidden from him and that he has no, absolutely no recourse, meaning nobody has recourse, meaning the people that are elected do not really run the country in a meaningful way. And I think that he would probably agree with that, though he would understand that saying it that way is frankly dangerous.

It’s playing with fire. You get more and more Americans basically to believe that, hey, why vote? Why do anything? A bunch of shadowy people behind the curtain, whether they’re Jews or they’re not Jews or they’re Israelis or Frenchmen or what have you. That is just unbelievably disempowering, and it’s unbelievably cynical. And if you really do believe that is the case, then, hey, there’s no… what are you going to do? What are you going to do about it? What is the plan? What is the plan? And in societies, one after the other, not just in regards to Jews but kind of throughout history, whenever you get this conspiratorial mindset where it’s like, it doesn’t matter what we do, someone else is always in control, then the hunt begins for that someone else. And that someone else, there’s only one way to settle that.

And I think that the vice president is unbelievably irresponsible when it comes to this, and I think that he needs to be challenged specifically on some of these points, especially if he’s going to run for president. Well, he absolutely does. And as I say, we made a whole documentary about this. If they want to see the full chronology of all the red flags we’ve seen about him, people really should go to our website and check that out, because we tried to document it. Although the thing is, we released it only a couple of weeks ago, but there’s just more things happening even recently, where he was pushed on Tucker Carlson and he won’t kind of disavow this guy’s crazy views.

We’ll talk about that in a moment. But let’s just talk a bit more about the Russia connection. Explain to us what evidence you found. And why would Russia be interested in wanting millions of Americans to believe that Israel secretly controls their government?

Well, two big reasons. The first one is geopolitical. The other day Netanyahu said that of all of America’s allies, Israel is the only one that fights. And he’s absolutely right. It is in the interest of enemies of the United States to destroy the relationship and the alliance between America and its only ally that fights. I think that’s absolutely a no-brainer in terms of something that Russia would want, or something that China would want, something that any U.S. adversary would want. Then there’s the other thing too, and the other thing is the kind of larger play when it comes to the United States. And really that’s the prize for the Russians, for any enemy of the United States: the conspiratorial madness.

What I found when researching the book: I found a kind of an amazing book that had never been translated into English by Alexander Dugin, who is a…

Yes, I’ve been talking about him.

Yes, he’s a kind of infamous Russian philosopher, ideologue, political warfare… it’s hard to know exactly what he is and sort of where he fits into the Russian cosmology. But he wrote a book about conspiracy theories as information warfare, I guess finally published in 2005, but written over decades before then. And the second half of my book is an annotated translation of that book, Conspirology.

Basically he says that conspiracy theories are uniquely suited to break brains and to make people crazy and to destabilize societies, open or closed societies. And of those conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic ones uniquely are the most powerful and the most potent, because kind of everyone knows by now that anytime you go down the road of conspiracism, eventually you get to the Jews. There are kind of many different reasons for that, but Dugin understands that, yeah, this is the case.

And he will say, hey, even if the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are fake, even if a lot of the other stuff, allegations against Jews or against Israel, is fake, it doesn’t matter, because it still creates within the people an attitude. It creates a dislocation. It makes the people despise their own country. And that does what? That is exactly what… explicit. Yeah, what does that do? People despise their own country, they believe it’s… Well, it makes them.

So what it does is, the Russians can’t come and say, “Hey, patriotic Americans, I want you to hate America.” That’s not going to fly. But what they can say is, “Hey, patriotic Americans, we love you. But the Jews are running your country. They’re running it to the ground. They’re trying to destroy you.” And that’s how you get someone who is an American patriot to sort of flip. Once they believe this narrative, once they believe this lie, they will then flip to work with America’s enemies against the country itself. And this is kind of very clearly what Dugin is all about. So that’s really the bigger motivation in terms of what the Russians want, why the Russians are even doing this.

And it’s quite disturbing. If you study Dugin’s theology, he kind of believes in some kind of apocalyptic vision where Russia and the Islamic world will fight some kind of Jewish anti-Messianic figure or whatever. He’s basically trying to undermine America. He sees really the conservative right as one of the biggest threats to his whole vision, because they create that coalition that’s trying to stand up to all this. And so he’s trying to destroy it from within.

Now, the question is, people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and others who have bought into all this stuff: do you think that they are knowingly pushing Russian disinformation? Or do you think it’s just… I know that they are more pro Russia, and it just happens to be convenient that Russia’s providing all this conspiratorial information to them.

Yeah, I think they’re knowingly doing it. I also think that.

Like actively talking to them, you think?

We know that they are. We know that Tucker Carlson is actively talking to Dugin and to other Russians. We know also that Candace Owens is. The extent of that is, frankly, a counterintelligence investigation that should be happening today, or frankly yesterday, on the part of the U.S. government.

One of the final chapter in my book deals with how to fight back against this. We just have not taken information warfare, information operations, seriously at all. I think that we need to begin to do so, because the costs are great.

Right now what they’re doing is for a very low price: the price of bots and maybe paying some influencers. That’s certainly a lot cheaper than any kind of military hardware. That’s your best bet when it comes to bang for the buck: you can go and you can fight information war for peanuts. And even better is when the United States government doesn’t recognize that you’re doing it and just says, okay, well, this is fine, we’re not going to do anything about this.

I think we need to change that immediately. I think we need to target, for example, the people who are abroad who are running these programs. There are people who go to work every day to their offices in Moscow, and their job is, how do we get more Americans to despise their country and to be conspiratorial maniacs today?

And those people don’t have First Amendment protections. Those people are enemies, and I think we should treat them as such. In addition, there’s the infrastructure. There are boiler rooms with millions and billions of bots that frankly should be targeted. So there are things that the United States, and frankly Israel, needs to do. Israel is a victim of this too, and in the same way they’re also doing nothing.

I don’t know about the Israeli government, but I know that in the U.S. government there are, I think, 16 different offices that deal with similar things to information warfare, hostile enemy information warfare. Their offices, they deal with hackers or people who are stealing identities or trying to sabotage natural resources or factories or infrastructure or things like that. Okay, that’s fine. But there’s nothing going after the people who are actually breaking brains and who are using social media in particular as a way to make Americans crazy.

And I think that’s absolutely the biggest national security threat that we face, let’s say the assaults on Americans’ cognitive health.

Yeah, I think that’s a really powerful way of putting it. Do you think that this conspiracy, this rise in just Jew hate that we’re seeing, and this conspiracy obviously fuels that, do you see it gaining more momentum in America? Are Americans waking up perhaps to this a bit more? My sense is, people like Tucker and Candace, I don’t know, maybe it’s just wishful thinking, I’m hoping that maybe their stock is starting to decline a bit, people are starting to wake up to just their insanity. But I guess I’m not on the ground, so what are you seeing?

I think that the threat is far larger than just some particular hosts. Yes, I agree with you, it does seem like Candace and Tucker, their stars are fading. And I think as they got more and more explicit and went down the road, I think more and more people started to say, wait a minute, this is really weird.

Both of them, as you know, started from a position of… This is why they were dangerous: because they started from a position of kind of absolute trust from a large segment of the right in America. So when they flipped, it’s not like some random person flipping. It’s someone who already comes with an accrued record. And so that’s more dangerous.

There’s the flip side of that. That kind of dynamic could activate more people on one hand. But on the other hand, as it activates more people, as it gets more and more explicit, as they keep cranking the volume up on the anti-Semitism, more and more normal people who were their fans before kind of wake up and say, okay, this is crazy now. And I think that’s what happened. But again, that doesn’t tell us really very much about the larger movement, because they may recede into the background and other people may pop up.

Who are also pushing the same kind of nonsense. So, unfortunately, sad fact is that anytime you see a country in crisis, in crisis internally, you see a rise of anti-Semitism like this. Yeah.

But to me, the larger issue is really the issue of social media, is the technology. We’re in a place where we are completely addicted to our phones. And these phones can be hacked. I mean, not literally, but our brains can be hacked by bad actors who, again, for very little money, can influence the things that we see all the time. And we just need to be more cognizant of that. There are things that the United States can do, there are things that Israel can do. But at the end of the day, I wrote the book because I want people to understand that informational warfare is real, it’s a thing that happens, and it’s not a conspiracy theory. I just think that, for the record, people kind of need to know this.

Yeah, it’s funny. In a way, the false conspiracy, the creation of it and the pushing of it, is in and of itself a conspiracy.

My last question to you. If someone was watching this interview and they genuinely still believed that Epstein was working for Mossad, what is the single most important piece of evidence that you’d want them to consider?

Well, the book is not about Jeffrey Epstein, and the book is not about Mossad. What the book is about is a very specific lie that was manufactured and laundered and pushed through the media: that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative or asset who was blackmailing American leaders to benefit Israel. That was a lie, and I can show the genesis of that lie and then all throughout the flowering of how it traveled through the media. And that’s really what the book is about. If someone shows up today and is completely convinced that Epstein was Mossad, I would ask them, okay, what is your evidence? And then I would interrogate that evidence and hopefully try to convince them that there’s really nothing to it.

It depends what they say. So if they come back and they say, well, he was friends with Ehud Barak, and I say, well, okay, well, he was also friends with Bill Clinton. He was friends with Mohammed bin Salman. He was friends with Woody Allen. He was friends with Prince Andrew. Why would you isolate Ehud Barak? Does that make any sense to you? Does it make any sense to you, for example, that…

One of the things that I write in the book is that a lot of people kind of forget that the world of intelligence and espionage is still a part of the government, meaning that every year a supervisor has to sign their name on the receipts for how much they spend. And I don’t see anyone who’s ever made any allegation that there was some kind of a… here’s what the Israelis got from X.

So what we have is the allegation of this massive, open-ended, multi-multi-million dollar thing. If it indeed was some kind of intelligence, if it was intelligence by anyone in the world, it would have cost so much money. The island, the house, the ranch in New Mexico, the plane, the this, the that: all this stuff would have been an investment in keeping this thing going. So it’s like, okay, well, this costs a lot of money.

What then do you get from this? And that’s why I bring up the government. Intelligence is still part of the government. Somebody has to look at it and say, we’re not getting anything back from this to justify the spend. And if we’re going to do anything like this anyway, why would we do it with a guy who’s already a well-known, convicted, whatever, piece of garbage? Why not find someone who’s unknown? It just doesn’t make sense.

Which, by the way, speaking to someone that was in Sayeret Matkal for a long time as an intelligence… that’s the way Mossad tend to work, typically. They want to find people who are very unassuming.

Well, right. Yeah, exactly. And I don’t blame people for not really understanding the spy world. But a lot of people really watch too much movies about this. And if someone thinks this stuff, I have no problem speaking to someone who may mistakenly believe something that is not true, because we can talk about it. The problem is when you have fanatical belief that will not budge. And that’s what you see here. And I think that’s what Dugin and others are kind of very smartly counting on. Because it’s like, the minute you touch the Jew button, then you get that sort of impression, where it’s like, this is my position and I don’t care about any other evidence. I’m just clinging to it no matter what. And that’s sort of why they do it.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, this has been a really enlightening conversation, David. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today and your insights. Really appreciate chatting with you.

My pleasure.