Anne P. Mitchell took the chair and opened with the question the book keeps getting asked: is The Greatest Heist the story of how Russia captured the presidency? The answer set the hour. It is the story of how Russia infected American capitalism, crashed the markets more than once and captured the presidency, in that order, because the first two were needed to do the third.
What the chapter proves. On Monday, July 30, 2007, just before nine in the morning, a fax reached American Home Mortgage, the tenth-largest lender in the country, from Liquid Funding Ltd. of Hamilton, Bermuda: a margin deficit of $13,626,390, cash by five o'clock. Liquid Funding's own lawyers put that sentence in a court filing six weeks later, and Zev put the filing on screen. Bear Stearns followed forty minutes later with its own demand. By Friday the company had fired 6,500 of its 7,500 workers. On Monday it filed for bankruptcy, and 197,000 families' mortgages went with it. Jeffrey Epstein built Liquid Funding with Bear Stearns in 2000, chaired it until March 2007, and kept his stake when he stepped down. It was licensed to lend two hundred dollars on one and ran at sixty-seven: $6.7 billion borrowed on $100 million, rated AAA by Fitch and Moody's, backed by a $250 million JPMorgan credit line. It pumped the mortgage market, lent to American Home on both sides of the trade, and was first in line to pull the plug. Then it was the one lender paid back in full.
What was said on air that is not yet in the book. Zev's reading of why the plug was pulled that week: the federal sex-trafficking investigation in Palm Beach was ramping up, prosecutor Marie Villafaña had called Les Wexner, and the money-laundering track she opened would have led straight to Liquid Funding and the people behind it. "That's my read. That's not something I can confirm." The chapter does not make the claim, and neither does this post.
What Anne brought. She said she holds a set of Epstein's own documents the Justice Department does not have, and released one of them earlier in the day: a 29-point memo Epstein compiled for himself, apparently for his lawyers, that reads as if it was never sent. Two of its points, she said, are about the money-laundering investigation he was being threatened with. She also described a settlement that was on the table before the 2008 plea, in which Epstein agreed to admit sex with twelve girls, four counts of intercourse and eight of what the paper calls penetration, before the prosecutor moved to charge forty counts and he refused. Zev had not seen it. Her reading of the whole period: "The girls were the distraction from the money laundering."
Epstein told the rest himself. Zev played two cuts of the 2019 Bannon interview. In the first Epstein explains fractional reserves with a single dollar and says his father, who worked in the Parks Department, could not have imagined lending out money you did not have. In the second he describes his two collect calls from the Palm Beach jail in September 2008, one to Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns and one to his friend at JPMorgan, a phone in each hand while the bank he was a partner in went under. "So I found that amusing," he says.
The $57 million that broke Ralph Cioffi's hedge funds in April 2007 was never Epstein's. His own settlement schedule shows $20,155,344 in the fund, and he stayed in and took the loss. The redemption came from Concord Management, which managed money for one client. The client is Russian. Chapter 11, coming soon, names him.
Two memories from the room. Zev covered 2008 as a producer on the CBS morning show and remembers Jamie Dimon coming in for an editorial board that year, the first banker he had met. "It did seem like he was trying to steer us in terms of the coverage." And Bear Stearns, long before Liquid Funding, was the bank Donald Trump called for casino money. Ace Greenberg would take the call and the bonds would appear.
The hour closed on the election. If the Republicans win the House on this polling, it was rigged. So vote early, get everyone you know to vote, and be ready to answer whatever comes after the count. Anne's CIA guest from her own show that morning, a thirty-year veteran and a 9/11 briefer, had told her the same: expect fast ones, expect lawsuits, and expect it to hold.
The questions in the chat outran the hour. Zev promised an AMA later this week or early next. Every chapter is at thegreatestheist.com, with a free summary of Chapter 10 on the site.
Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.
