An author has claimed that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein oftentimes knew what was coming in geopolitics before it happened.
In a new column for his Substack, HOWL, author Michael Wolff recalled several instances in which he said Epstein had a way of predicting political events before they occurred, likening him to a “mobster.”
“As with mobsters, there was a sense of knowingness, of a deep, well-informed cynicism, and, too, the suggestion that he had important people, politicians, law enforcement, bankers in his pocket and always talking to him,” Wolff wrote. “There was a constant sprinkling of extraordinary but otherwise casually revealed information.”
He pointed to one telling moment in which Epstein predicted Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s moves before they came to light.
“Months before it occurred, he was predicting the invasion of Crimea, and years before,” Wolff wrote. “Putin’s sweep into Ukraine—with a sideline commentary on Putin’s sex life.”
Wolff also noted that Epstein, through his high-up DOJ connections, seemed to be aware of when powerful people were under investigation, but Wolff notes that that was “ironic, of course, in that he would entirely miss when the DOJ moved against him.”
He wrote that Epstein seemingly knew Loretta Lynch would replace Eric Holder as attorney general in the Obama administration in 2015, weeks before her nomination.
Wolff wrote that Epstein appeared to know the price of OPEC crude oil price before it was released, although that was “courtesy of his friend” Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince. Documents released by the Justice Department suggest that Epstein and MBS had social and business ties.
In his “mobster” analogy, Wolff explained that part of what made Epstein intriguing was that he was “a person with no credentials nor apparent wherewithal whatsoever” but had somehow “command[ed] the attention and apparent respect of many of the world’s most powerful, successful, and talented people.”
“Reasonably, how could you not have run in the opposite direction?” he wrote. “As reasonably, how could you not want to see what was going on here, or sense that here might be the reality of ambition and power in New York, that there was something here that other people only got to voyeuristically read about, that this might be, for better or worse, the true center of the run amok world?”
Wolff concluded that “By the late 1970s, mobsters had begun to reliably act the role of mobsters, becoming what journalists and Hollywood wanted to see,” adding that “Epstein understood that, in a world of ever-increasing randomness if not absurdity, there might certainly exist a role for a man who seemed to know everything, and that he could play it.”
