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Michael Cohen testified Donald Trump into thirty-four felony convictions — the only criminal record ever attached to an American president. This weekend, Trump megadonor John Catsimatidis handed Cohen a radio show on 77 WABC, after telling the New York Post he “checked with the White House and they had no objection.” On a special Narativ Live, Zev Shalev convened the two people who watched this deal assemble in real time — Lev Parnas and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — to name what the hire actually buys.
Parnas put the transaction in one breath. “Michael Cohen wants to get a pardon. Michael Cohen wants to get back into the good graces of Donald Trump. Michael Cohen wants to start making money, living the lifestyle, and wipe out the past,” he said. His sources told him months ago that Trump and Cohen were talking directly and that Cohen had been inside the White House — back when the media treated the reconciliation as unthinkable. Parnas keeps receipts. “He never deletes his text messages. I even have the last text message, last week, where he texted me: let’s be friends.”
The mechanics matter. Trump cannot pardon a New York state conviction — his only road out runs through appeal, and an appeal needs the star witness recanting. Cohen supplied exactly that in January, claiming Alvin Bragg and Letitia James “pressured and coerced” his testimony. Shalev read the WABC arrangement against that timeline: a weekend slot now — Andrew Cuomo’s chair, while the disgraced ex-governor summers — with Catsimatidis dangling a five-day week “down the line.” Meaning, Shalev said, “if you come through with Donald Trump and you help him erase his criminal record, we will then let you have the five days a week.” Parnas didn’t treat it as a theory: “It’s not even a read. That’s exactly what’s going on.”
Leonard traced the deal to its origin — a document. After Cohen told an interviewer he had never heard Jeffrey Epstein’s name, one of her Substack readers surfaced an email from Cohen’s own lawyers proposing a Rule 35 motion: Cohen, already in prison, offering to trade information for a sentence reduction. “The information he had was information about Epstein and Donald Trump,” Leonard said. The man claiming ignorance had brokered the Palm Beach mansion deal that ended the Trump-Epstein friendship and, by his own later account, dropped the Katie Johnson file on Trump’s desk — with Epstein’s name on it.
Then the show played Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony: asked how many times Trump directed him to threaten someone, Cohen answered, “probably 500 times over the ten years.” Shalev added his own entry to that ledger: “He threatened all of us. He threatened me with choking.” Parnas filled in the pedigree — a childhood around the El Caribe, the Brooklyn club run by Cohen’s uncle and frequented by five mafia families and Russian godfather Marat Balagula — and named the succession: Roy Cohn, then Michael Cohen, then Rudy Giuliani, and now Cohen again. Trump always replaces the fixer. The fixer always comes back.
Where does it go? Parnas called WABC a test run. The endgame is bigger: Cohen berating Democrats on national television — Fox, if Trump gets his wish — building toward what Parnas described as the grand-reunion interview, a pay-per-view reconciliation. The station is already rehearsing the format. Giuliani held a WABC show until election denial got him fired. Anthony Weiner holds weekends. Roger Stone appears on the roster. Cohen inherits Cuomo’s chair. A rogues gallery, assembled by the one New York billionaire who phones the White House before making a hire.
The panel closed on the cost of covering it. Leonard described a month of coordinated attacks — fabricated websites, invented recordings, an obsessive account working her name “day and night” — that drove her to file FBI and IC3 reports. Shalev, called a Nazi despite a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, named the pattern from experience: get over the target and the institutional pushback arrives, dressed as something else. Parnas reported the same disruption across Substack — accounts bleeding subscribers, billing failures, chaos — four months before an election. The people reading the Epstein files are under attack; the man who offered to sell what he knew about the files just got a microphone.
Parnas promised the story doesn’t rest. He’s finishing an investigation into mega-donor money flowing through super PACs into democratic-socialist campaigns — foreign money included — and tracking special prosecutor Joe diGenova’s Southern District of Florida operation, which he warns will produce indictments aimed at Obama, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. And he opened a public campaign for a seat on Cohen’s new show. Equal time. On the record. With the texts.
Cohen swore Trump directed the crimes. He now sells the story that prosecutors directed him. Shalev’s advice ran the other way from the hype: ratings rule New York radio, and a show nobody hears dies fast. Spend your attention on the people reading the files — not on the man who offered to sell them.
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Lesley Groff spent her deposition insisting she never knew what she was scheduling. Then she scheduled the one thing that matters. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live special, Zev Shalev walked the Gates and Groff transcripts with attorney Ann P. Mitchell of Notes from the Front and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — each bringing a different toolkit: Mitchell the legal read, Leonard the deep work inside the files.
The line that never went dead
For a decade, Donald Trump has sold a story: he and Jeffrey Epstein fell out years ago, he threw him out of Mar-a-Lago, they never spoke again. Groff, Epstein’s executive assistant of roughly twenty years, contradicted it under oath. Asked how often she connected the two men by phone, she answered “once a quarter, maybe, or twice” — regular calls the panel read as stretching across roughly ten years and, they believe, to the 2016 election. Groff couldn’t recall when they stopped. For Shalev, this was the night’s headline. “I’ve been trying to prove that for ten years,” he said, “and there she goes just saying they’re still friends all the way to 2016.”
Mitchell supplied the legal mechanics of how Trump keeps his hands clean: he doesn’t put things in writing, so the contact runs assistant-to-assistant, with intermediaries — Steve Bannon among the names she cited — carrying messages between the two men. That structure, she argued, gives Trump the plausible deniability to claim he and Epstein never spoke directly while a communication conduit ran the whole time.
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For years, the microwave dishes on the mesas above Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch were a mystery that everyone filled with theory — a spy-grade rig, a military-grade encrypted relay, a CIA or Mossad line wired into the nuclear labs on either side of the property. The towers were real. The explanations were guesses. Nobody had the documents. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev laid out the ones Narativ found, and replaced the speculation with a paper trail — joined by New Mexico broadcaster Eddie Aragon, who knows the hardware and the high desert, for an expert read on what the findings mean.
What Narativ found
The anchor is a wire. On October 27, 2016, $41,131.61 left a Deutsche Bank account in St. Thomas and landed at a SunTrust account in Georgia belonging to Future Technologies Venture, LLC — a commercial network integrator, not a front. Its director of business development, Chris Cappiello, spent 2016 trading emails with Epstein’s money man, Richard Kahn, and the ranch manager, Brice Gordon, under a single subject line: “ZDC Microwave Link.”
The job was connectivity, and the reason it was hard is geography. High-speed fiber could be landed at exactly one place near the ranch — the top of Sandia Crest, a 10,620-foot peak 26.8 miles from Epstein’s front door. Fiber to the ranch itself did not exist and was not coming. So Future Technologies strung a chain of commercial DragonWave radios down off the mountain — crest to ranch tower, ranch tower to main house, main house to lodge — and engineered the link to a full gigabit. Gordon confirmed it was finished on September 26, 2016. The Federal Communications Commission granted Zorro Development five licenses to run it.
That detail collapses the spy-rig myth. The equipment was ordinary, off-the-shelf gear from a commercial vendor, carrying the ranch’s data because no carrier would run a line that far into the desert. The hardware was nothing exotic, but why go to these lengths to install high bandwidth internet to a sleepy horse farm occupied for 45 days a year.
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Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell ran an abbreviated FiveStack on Tuesday, and the countdown kept arriving at the same place. A housing bill held hostage. A loyalist purging the spies. Two Epstein enablers pleading ignorance. A primary night soaked in foreign money. An eleven-day trillionaire. By the close, Shalev named the thread out loud: there wasn’t a single story on the board that wasn’t guided by the interests of a foreign government.
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5️⃣ The Eleven-Day Trillionaire
Eleven days after SpaceX went public and made him the first trillionaire in history, Elon Musk fell back under the line — a market selloff of roughly $363 billion, with SpaceX down again to about $156 the day of the show. Blundell relayed what a hedge-fund friend told him over dinner: they turned away clients who wanted in. The reason was the valuation — near $1.77 trillion against a single real customer, the United States government, and almost no runway to grow into the number. “Valuation is b******t,” Shalev said. The richer point underneath: the man whose net worth swings a third of a trillion dollars in a week, with Tesla, X, Grok and $1.8 billion in crypto all lashed to the same mast, still owns the country’s only ride to orbit.
4️⃣ Mamdani’s Night, and AIPAC’s
Zohran Mamdani went three-for-three on his House endorsements, with Brad Lander burying Rep. Dan Goldman by thirty points. Shalev and Blundell read the result as a repudiation of AIPAC’s grip on who gets elected — and then refused the easy version of the story. Blundell drew the hard line: be as anti-Netanyahu, anti-Ben-Gvir, anti-Smotrich, anti-AIPAC as the facts demand, but the anti-Israel and antisemitic register running through some of the victory speeches visits the pain elsewhere, on a community that accounts for a fraction of the population and the majority of religious hate crimes. Shalev, born in Israel, separated anti-Zionism used as a proxy from legitimate criticism, and warned that candidates who win the primary on that register get crushed in the general — handing Republicans the seats.
3️⃣ The Target and the Scheduler
The House Oversight Committee released the Gates and Groff transcripts. Bill Gates described being worked for blackmail over affairs with two Russian women — set-ups, in Narativ’s reading, that Epstein engineered — and staying in the circle anyway, claiming he’d “heard” Epstein was a sex offender but never looked it up. Shalev and Blundell didn’t buy it from the man who built a search engine. Lesley Groff, Epstein’s scheduler of nearly two decades, testified she never knew what she was scheduling — while confirming she booked calls with Donald Trump up to the election. Shalev’s verdict on the “I didn’t know” defense was flat: she knew.
2️⃣ Who Benefits From Firing the Counterterrorists
Bill Pulte — the man who ran the FHFA machine that produced criminal referrals against Trump’s enemies — was sworn in as acting Director of National Intelligence on Friday and immediately began gutting the place: six intelligence officials fired, 45 detailees sent home, the counterterrorism and counterintelligence centers on the block for transfer or dismantling. Zev asked who benefits from firing counterterrorists. “Terrorists,” Dean answered. The show’s read: Pulte isn’t there to sharpen American intelligence. He’s there to manufacture confusion and cover into November — the same destination as the SAVE Act and the voter rolls.
1️⃣ The Hostage Standoff
The bill that started the show is the one that may decide it. A bipartisan housing measure — 85–5 in the Senate, 358–32 in the House — sat ready for signature Tuesday morning. Trump canceled the signing until Congress passes the SAVE Act, the proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID bill that Narativ has reported could strip 100 to 150 million Americans of the ballot. Trump turned up at Thune’s lunch with Senate Republicans to force it. As the show aired, the outcome of that confrontation was still landing. The framing was not: a president sacrificing the country’s homes to secure the vote against its people.
THE PATTERN
Pull the thread through all five and the same hand keeps surfacing — foreign, hidden, and closer to the center than any of these stories admit. “Everything is tied to foreign intelligence,” Shalev said in his close. “There’s just not a single story we can look at today that isn’t guided by the forces of a foreign government.” Not left, not right. Power protecting itself, and barely bothering to hide it.
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Amanda Ungaro spent three and a half months in ICE custody before she asked a judge to deport her to Brazil — not because she’d done anything, she says, but because she wanted out of the facilities. On Narativ Live, in her first long on-camera interview, she laid out who she believes put her there: Paolo Zampolli, the man she calls the father of her child, the model scout credited with introducing Melania to Donald Trump, and the president’s longest-running friend.
That is where a custody fight becomes a national-security story.
The setup. Zampolli, by Ungaro’s account, kept her for two decades without easy access to her own passport. When she finally left him, she says, a custody battle over their son turned vicious — and charges followed, including an allegation she’d faked a medical license. She denies it. Zev’s read, laid out on the show: the charges were a pretext to mark her as a criminal so ICE could remove her. Ten officers came in the morning. She lost the custody fight, lost the country, and now sits in Brazil while Zampolli — appointed by Trump to an “ambassador for global partnerships” role — stays close to the First Lady. Ungaro calls him “Melania’s shadow.”
The question Melania won’t answer. Ungaro says she appealed directly to the First Lady, who acted shocked and then did nothing. Zev’s point landed flat and hard: one phone call to Homeland Security from Melania Trump could have ended the detention in minutes. It never came. So either the First Lady let her self-described best friend be deported, or she had a reason to want her gone. Ungaro and Melania traveled the same road — models pulled out of Brazil and Slovakia through the same agency pipeline that Ellie Leonard describes as modeling at the front and something darker behind it.
The Russians in the frame. Zev’s investigation, as he described it, found Zampolli’s orbit thick with Kremlin-linked figures — three people he ties to Russia’s FSB, a woman named Svetlana Pozhidaevawho also worked for Jeffrey Epstein, and Sergei Belyakov , a former Russian deputy economics minister Zev calls Epstein’s “Russian handler,” who signed off on one of their U.S. visas. A sports envoy and a Dominican Republic posting, Zev argued, are thin cover for an intelligence cell parked inside the United Nations, moving people on diplomatic passports. Parnas, who lived inside Trump’s world as the operator sent to “do the dirty work,” said he never heard Zampolli’s name in those rooms — but he remembers the era, the Miami–New York corridor, and the women being moved through it.
The pipeline. Leonard walked through the machinery: Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 agency as a front to bring girls into the country, fake receipts to convince Epstein the agency earned its keep when it never turned a real dollar, and the O-1 “Einstein” visa used to import them — Epstein himself signing off, insisting everyone arrive “legally.” She cited the unredacted Maritza Vasquez deposition naming girls of 13, 14 and 15 out of Brazil, and the people who ran the visa program and, she notes, still work in it. She pointed to a model brought in at 14 though listed as 18, escaped, retrieved, groomed. And she pointed at the money: the JP Morgan litigation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where investigators found 134 accounts opened for Eastern European girls — funded by Epstein, drained by no one but him. Parnas filled in the period detail that makes it all possible: pre-9/11, he says, a real U.S. passport went for $10,000.
The survivors’ revolt. The night’s second break came from Parnas. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book reportedly draws on audio from a secured room — transcripts of JD Vance and the FBI director weighing the Insurrection Act, Parnas says, around the question of how to bury the Epstein files and shield Trump, at the same stretch when Todd Blanche was set to meet Ghislaine Maxwell before her transfer. More than a dozen survivors, led by Lisa Phillips, signed a statement after learning the material had been held for a book rather than handed to investigators. Leonard’s timeline cuts to the bone: if the reporters had the tapes shortly after the meeting, that knowledge existed before Maxwell got her proffer and was moved. “Their trauma is not content,” the survivors wrote. “The truth must come out now.”
Zev kept the frame steady all hour: this is what independent reporting catches that the legacy press sits on — and what it costs the people waiting for the truth. A part two is coming, on Ungaro, on Zampolli, and on the intimidation campaign the three of them say is now running against them on social media.
Editor’s note: The claims about Zampolli, the Trumps, and the figures named above were made by Ungaro, Parnas, Leonard, and in Narativ’s reporting; Narativ has not independently corroborated every one. Melania Trump has publicly denied any relationship with Epstein. Those named have not responded.
Subscribe to Narativ for the rest of this investigation — part two lands next week.
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Amanda Ungaro spent twenty years inside the world the Melania and Donald Trump. in her first live interview since the Trump administration deported her, she walked Zev through it — the plane, the agencies, the United Nations passport trade, and a First Lady she says watched it all happen - and did nothing to stop it.
The Abandonment
For nearly two decades, Ungaro and Zampolli were one of only two couples at Melania’s table — White House Easters, Christmases, New Years. Melania was the first to call Ungaro’s son Giovanni every birthday, 7 AM, Secret Service arriving with presents. When Ungaro was taken — ten police breaking into her Miami home in an arrest she says Zampolli orchestrated through an ICE contact who has since been promoted — she got word to the First Lady and asked for help. “She looked like she was in shock, but she didn’t do anything,” Ungaro said. Three and a half months in detention. A prosecutor who tried twice to convert it into prison time; an email found by her son in which Zampolli wrote she should serve six years. “She knows me since I’m 18 years old. She knows who Paolo is. For me, it’s done. She lost her values.”
The Agreement
The interview’s most consequential thread ran through the East Wing. Zampolli’s claim to fame — that he introduced Melania to Donald Trump in 1998 — is, Ungaro said, a story he maintains by arrangement. “The investigators, they have proof it was Jeffrey Epstein” who made the introduction, she said. Zampolli’s reward for keeping the official version alive: access. He is close to Melania, not Trump — “they text each other all the time.” He asked the First Lady for an ambassadorship — Paris, London, or Rome — but, as Ungaro put it, a man like Zampolli could never pass a security clearance. The consolation prize was Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, a title with no apparent duties beyond travel and photographs with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. When Melania made her extraordinary unprompted statement in April denying any relationship with Epstein, Ungaro believes the First Lady was preempting her — responding to a post Ungaro had put online days earlier.
The Epstein files provides several documents that bolster the claims that it was Melania Jeffrey Epstein, not Zampolli, who introduced Melania to Donald Trump
The Plane
Ungaro was 16, a working model recruited out of Brazil at 13, when her agent Jean-Luc Brunel told her they’d catch “a friend’s plane” to a New York job. She boarded Epstein’s 727 and counted close to thirty girls — 14, 15, 16 years old, sitting on laps, worked by Ghislaine Maxwell “like best friends.” “They don’t look like models,” she told Brunel. “They look like students.” When they landed in New Jersey, Brunel tossed her a small bag and told her to put it in her purse. She realized it was drugs and threw it back. He threw it again. She threw it back again. She never saw Epstein after that day — but her name was on the manifest the DOJ released in 2021, beside Brunel’s.
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Somebody carved a hole the size of 47 swimming pools out of Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — and the timing is the tell. According to a New York Times account cited on the show by Albuquerque radio host the Rock of Talk, Eddie Aragon of KIVA, the excavation broke ground at the end of January, the start of February this year: the same window the Epstein files were being released. Before the searches. As the documents went public. That’s when the digging started.
On tonight’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev walked Aragon through Narativ’s scientific evidence that a structure was built under Zorro Ranch in 2014-2015 and then removed the week the Epstein files were released. Aragon had once worked for the firm that laid the ranch’s original foundation — through the evidence frame by frame. The conclusion they reached isn’t that they know what was under the ground. It’s that the ground itself proves something was there, and that someone went to extraordinary expense to take it out.
What the ground shows
The cut measures roughly 1.7 acres — about 76,000 square feet — and runs 20 to 25 feet deep, gauged against the 25-foot buildings beside it and confirmed by shadow analysis. That’s 155,000 cubic yards of displaced earth, the dirt volume of 47 Olympic pools, hauled out and then back in to refill the hole. It sits directly next to the main mansion, not out in the hills. A box cut, squared and leveled, on undulating high-desert terrain that doesn’t square itself.
Foundations don’t go this deep, this clean, this close to the house, with the spoil staged to bury it again. The geometry reads as removal, not construction. As Aragon put it: there is no ordinary reason to dig that up like that.
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Sarah Kellen sat in front of a congressional committee this week and dismantled the only version of herself the public ever knew. “I have read articles online labeling me as Ghislaine’s lieutenant,” she told the members. “That is a gross misrepresentation. I was a literal indentured slave. In fact, she even referred to me as her slave and minion.”
For years Kellen has been the villain in the margins of the Epstein story — the assistant, the scheduler, the woman named alongside Maxwell in the 2007 non-prosecution agreement. Her transcript, released this week and read aloud on tonight’s Narativ Live by Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, tells a different story. Kellen started where most of Epstein’s girls started: with nothing, and nowhere to go.
She was raised, she testified, in “a religious cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses” in North Carolina, “in a faith where women did not speak unless spoken to.” At thirteen, an eighteen-year-old man began pursuing her. She dropped out of school at fifteen to marry him, did marry him at seventeen, and was carried off to Hawaii thousands of miles from everyone she knew. Three years later he served her divorce papers at an airport — she signed without a lawyer because she did not know she was allowed one — and had her excommunicated. From one day to the next, her parents, her siblings, every friend she had were forbidden to speak to her. She was twenty-one, marooned on an island, no degree, no family, no money.
That is the raw material Epstein hunted. He did not have to break Sarah Kellen. Someone had already done it for him.
The introduction came through a celebrity hairdresser, Frederick Fekkai, who flew her to Maui for a hair show that did not exist and assaulted her in his hotel room. Then he offered to introduce her to his friend Jeffrey Epstein, “a scout for Victoria’s Secret.” Epstein flew her to a hotel casting, told her to undress, told her to come back at four. She had a plane to catch. She figured she would never see the man again. About a year later, a coworker mentioned a wealthy couple in New York who needed an assistant. The couple was Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “Unfortunately,” Kellen testified, “I got the job.”
Ellie called the coincidence what it was on air — not a coincidence. The same man, surfacing ten months later through a different mouth, in a different city, to close the door he had left open in a Hawaii hotel room.
What followed she described as indentured servitude. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year, on call every hour of every day, months at a time with no day off. “I understood the math exactly,” she told the committee. “I was being paid in part to be raped.” The abuse, she said, ran weekly and turned violent — a night in the Palm Beach gym where Epstein lowered the hurricane shutters, blasted the music so no one could hear, choked her and raped her. It continued, she testified, while he was supposedly serving his Florida sentence, by Skype, from a computer inside the Palm Beach County Stockade.
And all the while she sat in the most powerful rooms on earth. A room in Cuba with Fidel Castro. Asia and Africa with Bill Clinton, including lunch at the home of the Sultan of Brunei. Princess Beatrice’s eighteenth at Windsor Castle. Across a table from Ehud Barak in Israel. “I was a silent body in a chair beside men who started and ended wars,” she said. In 2007 two FBI agents approached her and another young woman at the St. Thomas airport. Epstein told them to wait, walked over, spoke to the agents himself, came back ten minutes later and said, “Let’s go.” The agents were gone.
Then the government did to her what Epstein had been doing all along. Later that same year, federal prosecutors wrote her name into Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement as a co-conspirator. No one asked her. No one questioned her. She learned her own name was in the document only after it was signed and made public. The United States branded her a criminal in a secret deal with her own abuser, and never spoke a single word to her.
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On Monday, New Mexico’s Epstein Truth Commission met for the first time and aimed its subpoena power. More than a dozen subpoenas are going out — to banks, to federal agencies, to law enforcement. The first focus is not a flight log or a wire transfer. It is a single email.
A former Zorro Ranch staffer sent it in November 2019, three months after Jeffrey Epstein died in his Manhattan cell. Two foreign girls, the email said, strangled during fetish sex and buried in the hills on the orders of Jeffrey and Ghislaine. One Bitcoin for the proof.
Narativ found that email buried in the FBI’s own released files soon after the Epstein Files were first published in compliance with the Epstein Transparency Ac. Our exclusive — The Bodies Buried at Zorro — was the first report anywhere of a logged federal tip alleging murder at the ranch. No other outlet had touched it. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury later carried the same document to the state attorney general. Every search and every subpoena that has followed traces back to a tip the FBI chose to ignore and a document we chose to publish.
The man who carried it
Eddy Aragon has lived with that email for six years. Albuquerque knows him as the Rock of Talk. He received the tip, recognized that whoever wrote it knew the property from the inside — the shorthand “Madam G,” the staff-only details — and walked it straight into the FBI’s Albuquerque field office, handing it to the agent who logged the intake. The Bureau dropped it into case 50D-NY-3027571 and stamped it “Pending Inactive.” Filed. Forgotten. In six years, Eddy told me tonight, not one agent ever called him back.
He is blunt about what that means: without his tip, there is no state investigation, no truth commission, no subpoenas this week. He is right. The federal government had the same document and sat on it. A radio host in New Mexico did the work the FBI would not.
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Christopher Armitage came on Narativ Live tonight to argue, in plain language, what most of the legal-political world has been too cautious to say aloud — that Justice Clarence Thomas could be indicted next Monday, in a Fairfax County courthouse, on charges already supported by the public record. The case does not require Congress, the Department of Justice, or the Supreme Court itself to do anything. It requires three Virginia officials who already have the authority to act, and the will to use it.
Armitage’s argument rests on a doctrine the Supreme Court has affirmed as recently as the 2019 Snyder decision — dual sovereignty: states are allowed to enforce their own laws, even on federal officials. The Roberts Court has narrowed federal fraud, bribery, and corruption statutes to the point that the federal-level case against Thomas may no longer be winnable, but Virginia’s laws are not bound by John Roberts’s reading. Thomas lives in Fairfax County. He files a Virginia resident income tax return.
The twenty years of private jets, superyachts, summer compounds at Harlan Crow’s Adirondacks property, tuition payments for a child he was raising, and a quarter-million-dollar motorhome from a separate benefactor — totaling, by Armitage’s accounting, more than twenty million dollars in gifts, of which roughly ten million are documented and unreported and another eleven million are estimated from gaps in the record — are income under federal tax law unless they meet the Supreme Court’s own 1960 “detached and disinterested generosity” test in Duberstein. A politically active billionaire whose business and ideological interests appear before the Court does not meet that test. Leaving that income off a Virginia return, with intent to defraud, is a felony under Virginia Code § 58.1-348.
The intent question — usually the hardest piece of a tax-fraud prosecution to prove — is the easiest one to read in Thomas’s record. He disclosed his first Harlan Crow flight in 1997, then stopped disclosing them for the next twenty years while continuing to take them, and amended his forms only for the specific trips reporters had already proven. He used to report large gifts as taxable income. He stopped. He knows.
The deeper contribution Armitage brought to the conversation tonight is the four-tier taxonomy of state resistance his soft-secession academic work has built — Tier 0 cooperative federalism, Tier 1 uncooperative federalism (Heather Gerken’s 2009 contribution, we don’t have to help you), Tier 2 soft secession (we don’t need you — Washington State’s economy alone exceeds plenty of European countries that maintain full safety nets), Tier 3 oppositional federalism (state criminal law turned on federal officials), and Tier 4 constitutional noncompliance (active intervention against federal action, such as state National Guards refusing to participate in mass deportations). The Thomas case is Tier 3. So is the fifty-thousand-dollar bribe Tom Homan took on Texas soil and could be charged for in a Texas courtroom if Texas had Democratic leadership. So is every federal corruption case the Roberts Court has narrowed out of federal reach and left lying in state jurisdiction. Armitage’s frame names what the right wing has been doing for fifty years — building state-level pressure that the Supreme Court eventually has to ratify — and asks why Democrats are not running the same play, applied for good.
On Pam Bondi’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee tomorrow on the Epstein files, Armitage’s instruction was direct. Every Democratic member with questioning time should open by stating, on the record and to her face, that they will pursue criminal perjury charges if she lies under oath. Then they should follow Ted Lieu’s example — start their questions by saying the president is a pedophile who is named in the Epstein files. Refuse to grant Bondi the lawyerly courtesy that has, until now, allowed every Trump-regime official to stonewall a hearing without consequence. “Call her a liar,” Armitage said. “Do it.”
On the November midterms, Armitage offered a deliberately bleak prediction: no veto-proof majority for the Democrats, a rigging campaign the existing checks cannot fully stop, and a Democratic Party whose own approval rating sits below Donald Trump’s because it has no counter-incentive plan for its voters. The fight, he said, is not about the outcome — it is about the daily practice. The right wing waged a fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade because they took the long-shot cases and refused to be told the cases could not be won. The same tactic, applied for good, can charge Clarence Thomas in Virginia on Monday, indict Tom Homan in Texas, and unwind the federal capture from below — one county, one statehouse, one indictment at a time.
The action items Armitage handed our viewers were not federal. Pressure your state attorney general. Pressure your county prosecutor. Pressure your statehouse representative. Pressure your city council member if that is what you have access to. Treat the prosecution movement the way the right wing treated Roe — a multi-decade campaign of state-level pressure that culminates in courthouse doors opening, not closing. Steve Descano, the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney, spent six years in the Justice Department’s Criminal Tax Division and knows how to read this case. Governor Abigail Spanberger has the authority under Virginia Code § 2.2-511 to ask Attorney General Jay Jones to take it up. None of them has moved. All three of them can.
What came through most clearly tonight is that nothing about this requires permission from the institutions that are failing. It requires a county prosecutor in Virginia who is willing to do his job, and enough constituents writing, calling, and showing up to make doing that job the safer political bet. Charge him on Monday. Then charge the next one.
Christopher Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic and is the architect of the soft-secession framework — academic working paper, free booklets, and tools at the link.
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Andrew Lownie sat across from me in shorts on Monday afternoon. The paperback of The Rise and Fall of the House of York drops Thursday in the States — the book Simon & Schuster pulled to delete a single line was published as a paperback in Britain and is tracking for number one. Next, American readers get the book on Thursday.
Lownie referenced an FBI intelligence document dated January 2026, headed RIS and the People’s Republic of China. The subject is Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The links being mapped: Russian criminal gangs, Russian intelligence services, Chinese state intelligence. Andrew served at the Ministry of Defence. He was a trade envoy. He collected secrets in both roles. Lownie writes about that document in the new paperback.
“In some ways Epstein was a player in a bigger story,” he said. He thinks Epstein was a Russian asset recruited much earlier than people realized. That, he said, explains where the money came from.
I pushed him on the timeline. I told him what Stephen Hoffenberg told me before he died — that Epstein and Maxwell knew each other in the 1980s, that Epstein was working with Maxwell on his financial issues in the dying days of Maxwell’s life. I told him what Ari Ben-Menashe told me on the record — that he met Epstein in Robert Maxwell’s London offices during Iran-Contra. That Maxwell wanted to bring Epstein onto the operations team. That Tel Aviv — the Military Intelligence Directorate — had already approved. That Ghislaine and Epstein were an item at a very young age. That Robert Maxwell thought Epstein was going to marry his daughter.
Lownie did not flinch. He said it lines up with what he is hearing from a source on the periphery in the mid-1980s — Epstein, Ghislaine, and Andrew running around London, doing the same things they would do later.
If that’s true, the official story is wrong. The Concorde story — Ghislaine penniless, flying to New York after her father’s death, falling into Epstein’s arms — is a cover. They had already planned to take over Robert Maxwell’s business.
The Rothschilds keep showing up. Evelyn de Rothschild was close to the Queen. Lynn Forester de Rothschild was close to Epstein and close to Andrew. The witnesses at her wedding to Evelyn were Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew. Lownie said the mainstream press will not touch her — she is rich and litigious. Australian television spiked his interviews on this subject.
I asked him about the Queen. Did she know.
“The Queen knew everything,” he said. Intelligence officers worked inside the palace. Letters were written to her for fifteen years. Intelligence officers came to her and were turned away by her private secretaries. The 2010 Ferguson access-selling story. The 2022 High Court case where the Yorks could not explain £1.3 million in their account. Nothing was done. The cover-up ran from the Queen to the King. It would still be running if the Epstein files had not dropped at Christmas.
I asked the question every Narativ reader wants answered. Does Andrew face real justice.
Lownie does not think so. He thinks Charles will not let his brother stand trial because Andrew might call the King as a witness. He thinks Mandelson is different. Mandelson, he said, goes to prison.
We ran out of time. The notes match from two angles. The story begins earlier. The network is bigger. The cover-up has been running for fifteen years and is breaking now because Substack reporters keep digging.
Andrew Lownie’s The Rise and Fall of the House of York is out Thursday. Buy it. Subscribe to his Substack. He has paid for every page.
Watch the full conversation on Narativ Live. Subscribe at narativ.org.
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House Republicans didn’t lose the Iran war powers vote tonight.
They pulled it — because they were about to lose.
For three roll calls they defended Trump’s war on the floor. Tonight, with Golden flipped and their own members gone home, they wouldn’t let the floor be counted at all.
Asked point-blank what happened to the vote, the chair said only: “that was a women’s history museum.” Then moved on.
A pulled vote keeps the loss off the books. It’s barely better than losing — and they know it.
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Eddy Aragon broadcasts from Albuquerque on KIVA — “The Rock of Talk.”
When Jeffrey Epstein died in August 2019, the FBI searched his Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, and his Caribbean island. One Epstein property was left alone: Zorro Ranch, in the high desert south of Santa Fe. The local ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates would not touch the story. The people who had worked on the ranch called Aragon’s station instead. His AM signal carries to the small towns around the property — Edgewood, Moriarty, Stanley — and for seven years the leads came to him because there was nowhere else for them to go.
In November 2019, three months after Epstein’s death, one of those leads arrived as an email. The sender said he was former Zorro staff — “a person that has been there and seen it all.” He said he had taken material from Epstein’s home “as my insurance.” And he wrote one sentence: two foreign girls had been buried in the hills outside the ranch, on the orders of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Aragon did what a citizen is supposed to do. He took the email to the FBI in person, sat for a formal intake — name, Social Security number, a background check — and handed it over.
The Bureau did nothing with it. For six years.
That was not the only door Aragon tried. In 2019 and 2020 he helped convene a citizens’ grand jury on behalf of Chauntae Davies, an Epstein survivor who has said she was raped at Zorro Ranch. The filing was stamped and delivered to the Santa Fe courthouse. It was never examined — not by the county sheriff, not by the state Attorney General.
The work cost him. Aragon says his FM tower on the Sandia ridge was taken down, and his videos were stripped from every social platform he was on. The more he said about Zorro Ranch, the more the pressure came.
He was also right to keep going. The New Mexico Truth Commission now investigating Zorro Ranch — the first official inquiry into the property in its history — exists, Aragon says, because of the email he forwarded in 2019. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury found that email in the public Epstein files and carried it to the state Attorney General. The tip the FBI buried for six years became the document that reopened the case.
Aragon’s instincts run further than the documents, and on Narativ Live we drew that line plainly: the speculation about ritual and the occult is not something our reporting rests on, and Narativ’s investigation of the Epstein files has found no evidence for it. What Aragon has earned is narrower and harder. He received a credible insider’s allegation of bodies buried at Zorro. He handed it to the federal government. And he watched the government do nothing for six years.
What is actually beneath Zorro Ranch — who built the house, why the wells were drilled far past anything a ranch could use, who owns the land that rings it, and what one survivor says was done to her in a room below ground — is the subject of our investigation. THE GREATEST HEIST, Book 3, Part 2: ZORRO, publishes this week.
Aragon has one wish for the property, he told Narativ Live. If he could walk it, he would go straight to the mechanical rooms. “I know,” he said, “that everything is in those mechanical rooms.”
Thanks to everyone who came here in good faith — you’re the reason this space exists. The conversation on this post has run its course, so I’m closing the comments here. The rest of Narativ stays open, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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`Thomas Massie is out.
The Republican congressman from Kentucky’s 4th — the only Republican to vote against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the man who filed the discharge petition with Ro Khanna to force release of the Epstein files, the libertarian who called the war on Iran illegal — lost his primary tonight to a Trump-endorsed retired Navy SEAL named Ed Gallrein. Decision Desk HQ called it. NBC called it. CBS called it. Massie walked on stage and conceded. He said the race “went on longer than Vietnam.”
The bill came to $35 million. The most expensive House primary in American history. $19 million spent against Massie. $16 million for him. The Republican Jewish Coalition put up $4 million. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project added $2.6 million. Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson — the woman who paid for Trump’s 2024 campaign — moved millions through aligned channels. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew to Kentucky on Monday to campaign for Gallrein in his “personal capacity” — a phrase that means the Pentagon would rather not own it on paper.
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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche quietly signed and posted to the Justice Department’s website Tuesday a one-page document giving Donald Trump, his family, his businesses, his trusts, and every Trump-affiliated entity perpetual immunity from any IRS audit. The one page memo was signed today and was only made public by the New York Times after Blanche testified before a senate committee.
The document was made public after Monday’s surprise resignation of Brian Morrissey — The Treasury department’s Senate-confirmed general counsel of seven months — who walked out of the building Monday night, hours after the slush fund was announced, but before the tax audit immunity was made public today. We now know why.
Section C of Blanche’s document “releases, waives, acquits, and forever discharges” Trump and “related or affiliated individuals … family or others filing jointly … trusts, parents, sister or related companies, affiliates and subsidiaries” from any future IRS pursuit. Section D adds that the United States cannot be held liable for any action flowing from the related $1.776 billion fund, including fraud.
Attorney Anne P. Mitchell, on Narativ: “He is foreshadowing there’s going to be fraud, and there’s going to be tax fraud, more of it. And now he has this piece of paper that says he is immune from that.”
Trump sued his own IRS for ten billion dollars. Ninety House Democrats warned the presiding judge any settlement would be “a specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.” Before the judge could rule, Trump’s Justice Department dropped the lawsuit. DOJ released a nine-page settlement Monday creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that pays January 6 rioters and other claimed “victims of lawfare” out of the Treasury. The audit pardon was the second document, posted Tuesday — not in the public settlement. No court reviewed it. No judge approved it.
What Blanche signed is the forward-looking presidential pardon Trump cannot give himself, applied to his family instead. The Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling protected Trump for official acts during his presidency. It does not extend to his children, his trusts, or his joint filings. The audit pardon does.
Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. — attorney, law professor, Army veteran — walked through the legal vulnerability live on the broadcast. The lawsuit was dropped before any judge could approve a settlement. The document Blanche signed is a contract that refers to a “settlement agreement” no court has ever seen. “Todd Blanche doesn’t even have the authority to say that about the United States,” she said. “He is not the United States. It’s a contract. Contracts break.” State attorneys general are already being briefed.
The timing is visible. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosed last week that Trump personally executed 3,700 stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026 — $220 million worth — with matched-day purchases of Apple shares the day he praised Apple, Thermo Fisher shares the day he toured the plant. CNBC’s Jim Cramer was handed the news on air Monday and went silent for ten seconds. The audit pardon was signed Tuesday.
Denver Riggleman — the former Republican congressman who served on the January 6 Select Committee — joined the Narativ broadcast and said it on the record. “Anybody who signs off on this money going downrange, including Todd Blanche, I think is an enemy of the United States. I’ll state it directly.” The first piece pays the rioters. The second piece protects the family. The third piece is whichever state attorney general files first.
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Scott MacFarlane joins us from Washington with an insider’s view of the week that was. This week, every guardrail in Washington got stress-tested at once. From the seven seconds of gunfire on the Hilton ballroom floor, to a Supreme Court ruling that quietly redrew the American South, to a war that just hit Day 60 with no off-ramp. Watch the show and support Scott MacFarlane’s Substack - you’ll get plugged into the daily events before they happen.
Thank you Rick Kohut, LeftieProf, Lalisa, PJ Schuster, Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, and many others for tuning into my live video with Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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Yesterday the Supreme Court came down 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The ACLU is calling it Jim Crow 2.0. Barack Obama said the Court has abandoned its role in our democracy. The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Today, on a special early edition of Narativ Live, Christopher Armitage came on to explain why he has filed a complaint with the DC Bar to have Roberts disbarred — and why anybody watching can do the same thing in ten minutes.
The Callais ruling rewrote what it takes to challenge a discriminatory map. The plaintiff now has to prove that the people who drew the lines intended to discriminate, not just that the map does. Roberts has been working to dismantle the Voting Rights Act since the Reagan administration. He wrote the 1981 memo calling the effects test a quota system. He wrote the 2013 Shelby County opinion that took the teeth out of Section 5. Yesterday he finished the job on Section 2. Forty years. Same hand. Same project.
For sixteen years, Roberts has been calling something on his federal disclosure forms a salary that is not a salary. His wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, is a legal headhunter. She places senior lawyers — the kind leaving government, the kind firms pay top dollar for — at law firms that argue cases at the Supreme Court. WilmerHale. Hogan Lovells. Davis Polk. When one of those firms hires her candidate, the firm pays her a commission. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per placement. A 2022 whistleblower complaint from inside her former firm walked the spreadsheets to Congress: more than ten million dollars in commissions over seven years. Add the years that followed at her next firm, where the public numbers go dark, and the floor estimate runs past twenty million dollars. From the firms that argue in front of her husband.
Roberts called it salary. “Commission is influenced by outcome in a way that salary isn’t as directly,” Armitage said. The Chief Justice picked the word that hides the conflict. The whistleblower was a clerk and an attorney. She knew what she was looking at. Congress held a hearing. The story quietly disappeared. About a third of the cases Roberts has weighed in on have involved firms his wife recruited for. He has not recused from a single one.
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There is also an equity stake. Jane Roberts holds equity in one of the firms. A company with business in front of the Court appeared before her husband. The stake went undisclosed for three years. Bloomberg got hold of it. Roberts then filed an amended form and called the omission an error in judgment. “People have gone to jail for that with the same excuse,” Armitage said. George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer — when that was still a job — said Roberts fudged the paperwork in a way that is misleading. Misleading on a federal form is a crime. The Chief Justice of the United States knows that. He counted on nobody reading the forms.
The pattern holds across the conservative bloc. Ginni Thomas took money for years from conservative groups with business at the Court, then texted Mark Meadows trying to overturn the 2020 election. Clarence Thomas did not recuse from the January 6 cases. ProPublica then walked the country through more than twenty years of undisclosed gifts to Thomas from the billionaire Harlan Crow — yachts, private jets, real estate. Sam Alito took a private-jet fishing trip to Alaska with the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, did not disclose it, did not recuse when Singer’s fund had a $2.4 billion case at the Court, and voted with Singer. Three of the nine. Three sets of millions. Three sets of forms with the truth missing. “The Republican Party is a criminal organization primarily,” Armitage said. “What they sell is influence.”
Disbarment will not remove Roberts from the Supreme Court. The Constitution requires only nomination and confirmation. But the DC Bar holds federal judges to the same standard as everyone else who carries its license, and Armitage’s complaint argues that on its face, sixteen years of false household-income disclosures and a hidden equity stake are a textbook violation of the recusal statutes. The DC Bar has disbarred federal judges for less. Attorneys across the country are now filing their own complaints. Retired judges are filing them. The ACLU picked up the story today. “If we get him disbarred, he will forever live in infamy as the Chief Justice whose corruption got him disbarred,” Armitage said.
History rhymes. Six years ago Narativ reported on the Federalist Society money pipeline that bought the bench Roberts sits on. Yesterday’s Callais opinion is what you get when the man at the top of that bench has spent four decades waiting to write it — and sixteen years quietly collecting on the side. The mechanism doesn’t change. The names do.
Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic on Substack. His complaint is posted in full there at no cost. The DC Bar accepts public complaints by email and at 515 Fifth Street NW, Washington DC. Ten minutes. Your own words. Armitage was deliberate about waiting a week before posting his own filing — he wants people to write their own letter, not copy his.
Roberts has spent sixteen years counting on the certainty that nobody would read the forms.
Today, somebody read the forms.
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Two new photographs of Jeffrey Epstein joking with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman landed in Ellie Leonard’s signal threads this morning, hours before The New York Times published a long account of the same network. Both pictures show the two men close, intimate, at ease. The Times piece tracks the rest of it — tapestries from the Kaaba in Mecca shipped to Epstein’s island, tiles from Uzbek mosques, a golden dome modeled on ancient Syrian temples, and a 2014 photo of Epstein with the Emirati executive Sultan Bin Sulayem, who was later fired from his job at DP World over his Epstein ties. The point, Leonard noted on the show, is that Epstein “didn’t really know how to design a mosque” — he bought what cost the most because the price was the relationship. The mosque on St. James Island is not a mosque. It is a meeting room with a Mecca tapestry on the wall, built to impress the Saudis who came to dinner.
The Saudi connection runs back to the eighties. Adnan Khashoggi, the uncle of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, trained Epstein in what I called “the finer arts of criminal money laundering.” Decades later, Epstein discussed Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder with Steve Bannon over email in language Leonard described as “crass.” Mohammed bin Salman, Bannon’s Saudi counterpart, is the man American intelligence holds responsible for the killing. The same Mohammed bin Salman who took meetings with Epstein and kept a photograph of the two of them together on a side table in his office.
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Attorney Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. and I break down the affidavit and come to an alarming conclusion. The FBI affidavit is supposed to read as the chronicle of a near-assassination of the President. Read with discipline, it reads as the chronicle of a man Trump knew could not reach him.
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1. Allen chose the only door he could not get through.
The Washington Hilton has at least four other paths into the International Ballroom. Only one had a secret service-manned magnetometer screener. According to Aaron Parnas, a Hilton guest reported that the elevator key card system was disabled the evening of the dinner — any guest could ride to any floor unscreened. Despite these other options, Allen took the staff stairs down from his tenth-floor room and walked past every unguarded route to the only entrance with armed Secret Service agents standing in front of it. A Caltech-trained engineer who built drone targeting systems for the Pentagon does not pick that door if he intended to kill the president.
2. Allen Wasn’t even on the same floor as Trump
The dinner was on the Concourse Level. Allen ran at the magnetometer line on the Terrace Level — at least one floor up. Between him and the President: a bank of escalators, a thousand people, and several feet of concrete. There was no line of sight. There was never going to be a line of sight.
3. He exempted nearly everyone in the building.
Allen’s Rules of Engagement: hotel security, not targets unless they shoot at him. Capitol Police, same. National Guard, same. Hotel employees, not targets at all. Hotel guests, not targets at all. Buckshot, not slugs — in his own words, “to minimize casualties. There’s less penetration through walls.” Real assassins do not exempt the room.
4. He carved out law enforcement explicitly.
The email names FBI Director Kash Patel as the one administration official written out of the target list. As internet-law attorney Anne P. Mitchell put it on Narativ Live this afternoon, Allen “obviously thinks law enforcement is to be respected.” A man trying to assassinate the President does not write a respect-for-law-enforcement clause into his own document.
5. Trump used a secure route Allen never came near.
Since the Reagan attempt outside the Hilton in 1981, presidential visits to the venue go through a hardened entrance — drive into the garage, then directly up to the ballroom through an internal corridor sealed off from the public. Trump entered that way Saturday night. Allen approached a public stairwell on a different floor. The two routes never crossed.
6. Trump told the agents to wait.
He told Norah O’Donnell on Sunday’s captured 60 Minutes that he asked Secret Service to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.” Vice President JD Vance was escorted out before him. Trump stayed seated for roughly eight seconds. Real Secret Service does not ask permission to move a protectee. A real protectee does not refuse to move. The detail behaved like a detail that knew the situation was contained.
7. He has demanded no investigation.
Survivors of assassination attempts demand accountability. They demand firings. They demand Senate inquiries. They demand audits of the security plan. Trump has demanded none of that. He has called the people asking these questions “conspiracy theorists.” He has demanded one thing: that taxpayers pay to build his stalled White House ballroom. Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the bill today.
A man who has just survived an attempt on his life — and on his wife’s — would ask “how did this happen?”. He isn’t pushing a doomed ballroom build.
The Conclusion
He was not in the same room. He was not even on the same floor. He had four other paths into the ballroom and chose the hardest. He fired one round, hit a ballistic vest, and fell to the ground. He was nowhere near Donald Trump.
The Trump regime continues to frame him as an assassin. He was not. At best, Cole Tomas Allen was a politically frustrated American who chose a public act as his expression of that frustration — a statement made at the potential cost of his own life, not the president’s.
The federal government’s charging document does not survive that read. Allen’s assassination charges will not hold up, and neither will the regime's use of Allen’s words to brand its political opponents as accomplices to an assassination that was never going to happen.
Thank you "Sushi"(Jen) of MIND HAVEN, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Eric Lullove, Noble Blend, Sarah, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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