04/02/2026
I want to start with what is happening today, because I think if you understand today first, everything I am about to show you from fifty years ago will make so much more sense than it would if I started at the beginning with things that don’t apply to our lives now.
Today, Peter Thiel, the man who co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, co-founded the data surveillance company that processes intelligence for the CIA and the Pentagon, and whose money put the current Vice President of the United States in office, has a protégé network running through the executive branch of the American government.
JD Vance, who worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital and received $15 million in campaign backing from Thiel, is Vice President. David Sacks, Thiel’s Stanford Review co-founder and PayPal colleague, is AI and Crypto Czar. Michael Kratsios, former chief of staff at Thiel Capital, is Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Jacob Helberg, a Palantir adviser, was nominated as Under Secretary of State. Clark Minor, who worked at Palantir for 13 years, became Chief Information Officer at HHS. Jim O’Neill, former CEO of the Thiel Foundation, was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of HHS and then installed as acting CDC director.
Since Trump took office in January 2025, Palantir received $113 million in new contracts from DHS and the Pentagon. Palantir, the company Thiel built with venture funding from the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel, which processes data for intelligence agencies and law enforcement across the federal government, is now what Bloomberg has called the operating system for significant portions of American government.
And DOGE, which by mid-2025 had dissolved itself eight months before its scheduled end date, with OPM Director Scott Kupor confirming to Reuters that it was “no longer a centralized entity,” did something before it disappeared. Its personnel stayed, seemingly seeded permanently throughout the agencies they had accessed.
The man who helped dismantle USAID now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department. The person granted access to government health systems is now Chief Technology Officer at HHS. Another is now Chief at the Office of Naval Research. A fourth is developing AI tools to identify and eliminate federal regulations. The organization dissolved, and the footprint it had carved into those agencies remained after it. The oversight infrastructure and the financial investigation infrastructure are the same infrastructure.
The Suspicious Activity Reports at Treasury are how financial crimes get traced. The compliance systems at federal financial agencies are how transactions connecting Epstein, Deutsche Bank, Kushner, and sovereign wealth channels get flagged and investigated. DOGE accessed those systems, then embedded its people permanently inside the agencies that run them, then dissolved so that the footprint continues with no central entity anyone can subpoena or hold accountable.
Meanwhile, when you call 911 in jurisdictions across 23 US states, a company called Carbyne can remotely activate your smartphone camera, track your exact GPS location, run AI analysis on your call, and stream live video from wherever you are (when granted permissions according to any official documents). They advertise these capabilities openly. They raised $100 million in July 2025, and their US revenue jumped 400 percent between 2023 and 2024.
Carbyne is chaired by Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and former commander of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence directorate. It is founded and run by Unit 8200 veterans. Its advisory board includes Michael Chertoff and Kirstjen Nielsen, both former Secretaries of Homeland Security, and Trae Stephens, a former early Palantir employee, Founders Fund partner, and co-founder of Anduril Industries, who led Trump’s Department of Defense transition team in 2016.
Jeffrey Epstein invested $1.5 million in Carbyne in 2015 while Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $15 million in Carbyne in 2018. Epstein also invested $40 million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund between 2015 and 2016, money that sat hidden for nine years, grew to $170 million, and is currently the largest remaining asset in Epstein’s estate.
Is Epstein's estate still generating returns on that $170 million? Are the victims of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes receiving settlement payments that are partially funded by returns from Carbyne's emergency surveillance infrastructure? Has the money that should represent accountability been transformed into revenue from systems built by foreign intelligence veterans, embedded in American emergency response, collecting data on anyone who calls 911 in nearly half the country? Has justice become a pipeline for intelligence infrastructure?
And in 2022, former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Balaji Srinivasan, whose early startup Counsyl received investment from Thiel’s Founders Fund, published a book called The Network State that he frames explicitly as a manual. Sufficiently coordinated and capitalized groups can build new sovereign entities and exit existing nations entirely, he argues, describing how an aligned community crowdfunds territory, establishes governance, accumulates legitimacy, and eventually seeks diplomatic recognition as a new nation-state. He calls this the 21st century’s replacement for the nation-state model.
Elon Musk has stated explicitly that Mars will recognize its own law rather than Earth’s. SpaceX is building the physical infrastructure to establish permanent human settlement there, outside the jurisdiction of any Earth government. Starlink operates above any single nation’s regulatory reach. X has content policy set by one person with no democratic accountability or external oversight.
So here is what I need you to keep in the back of your mind as we move through all of this. A network of specific people with documented connections to each other is building communications infrastructure above national regulatory reach, financial infrastructure outside state control, data infrastructure that processes emergency calls for half the American population, and physical territory off-planet where, as the man funding the rockets has said explicitly, existing Earth law will apply only insofar as the people living there decide it applies.
While doing this, they are running the executive branch of the United States government and dismantling the oversight mechanisms that would be used to trace how this is being financed.
Now I want to show you where this comes from, because the infrastructure is being built right now but the idea itself is at least fifty years old, and the man who wrote it down in 1973 is the man who hired Jeffrey Epstein. This is where our story about the Barr family begins.
Thread One: The Construction Project
To understand what is being built, you need to understand what Epstein proved was possible.
In July 2011, a nuclear weapons scientist named Lowell Wood sent an email to a chain that included Bill Gates and Boris Nikolic, who was then Gates’s chief science advisor.
Wood spent decades at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In a separate document I found in the archive, he describes being summoned personally by CIA Director Bill Casey in March 1981 and handed a presidential directive to apply nuclear weapons technology against the Soviets entirely outside official channels, with what he calls “high cover.” He also describes being “peripherally involved in detecting the existence and location of, and then interacting with” offshore pirate communities as part of intelligence work. Wood is as deeply inside the American national security state as a person can be.
In the email I mentioned to Gates, Wood proposes a specific technical and financial architecture: lease war-surplus deep sea drilling platforms and position them at precise coordinates just outside internationally recognized maritime boundaries, declare sovereign nationhood, acquire naval enforcement capacity through international arms markets on a line of credit, then charge tolls on every cargo ship passing through the Straits of Malacca, which carries roughly a third of all global trade. The revenue is self-compounding into more platforms, more territory, more sovereign space, outside the jurisdiction of every existing government.
He suggests naming this entity the Sovereign Archipelago of Francis Drake.
Or perhaps, he writes, Jeffrey Epstein.
Francis Drake was a privateer whose legal distinction from a common pirate came down to one document: the Crown’s letter of marque, which authorized Drake to commit acts that would be hanging offenses for anyone else, in exchange for a share of what he brought back. The Crown publicly disavowed him when convenient and privately took its cut. Sound familiar?
Drake operated between legitimate state power and outright criminality, extracting wealth from gaps between jurisdictions, protected by his relationship to a sovereign who found his activities profitable.
When Wood wrote this my lightbulb went off. He was comparing Epstein to a privateer. He is placing Epstein in a specific category: people who build power in the gaps between jurisdictions, who are useful to powerful institutions precisely because they operate outside them, and who get celebrated right up until the moment they become inconvenient. He named Epstein because he understood that Epstein was exactly this person.
Little Saint James was a jurisdiction that happened to contain crimes. A crime scene is where something illegal occurred. A jurisdiction operates according to its own rules, with its own infrastructure, its own access controls, and its own relationship to legal authority. Epstein’s jurisdiction had controlled access by air and sea, with private aircraft moving people between countries faster than any legal system could coordinate a response. Financial vehicles were distributed across enough national boundaries that no single regulator could trace the money. He maintained properties in the US Virgin Islands, New Mexico, New York, Paris, London, and Palm Beach, with documented relationships with intelligence services across multiple allied governments, and a legal instrument that functioned as exactly what a letter of marque functions as.
Epstein operated for decades against active investigation by multiple governments, and almost nothing that happened inside his jurisdiction became subject to legal process under any single one of them. Wood recognized in 2011 that the concept had been demonstrated: you could build and sustain an extra-jurisdictional operating environment using existing geography, existing finance, and existing political protection. Epstein had spent decades proving it worked.
Now go back to what Thiel published in 2009, in an essay for the Cato Institute: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He identified three exits from democracy: cyberspace, outer space, and seasteading. He funded the Seasteading Institute with $1.25 million to pursue the third option, building permanent sovereign platforms in international waters outside the jurisdiction of any existing government.
Epstein’s money went into Thiel’s fund and Thiel’s money went into Carbyne, which is now processing emergency calls for a significant portion of the American population. Thiel’s protégé is Vice President, his network runs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and sits on the Department of Defense transition team. And Balaji Srinivasan, who received early Thiel investment in his startup and whose Network State manual has been widely embraced by this same cohort, published the roadmap for how to build the permanent version.
Donald Barr’s sovereign planet he described in the 1973 Sci-Fi book, seemingly built as a proof of concept through Epstein, is now being constructed at scale by people with $300 billion companies and seats in the executive branch.
Thread Two: What the Church Committee Actually Found, and Who Was Protecting It
In 1975, the United States Senate did something it had never done before. A committee chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho was given the authority to investigate the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA for illegal domestic operations. This came after years of reporting on COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert program to surveil and destroy domestic political movements, and after the Watergate revelations made it impossible to pretend that American intelligence agencies were operating within legal boundaries.
The Church Committee, named after its chairman, spent two years conducting the most sweeping investigation of American intelligence activities in history. What it found was systematic infrastructure, deliberately built, designed to be invisible, and operated across decades.
The CIA had been using three specific types of institutions to build operational capabilities that could not be traced back to the government: academic institutions as talent identification and recruiting pipelines, professional networks as cover for operational placement, and offshore corporate vehicles as financial infrastructure for moving money outside regulatory reach.
Those three pillars are the exact architecture of what Epstein built. So you imagine how shocking, yet not shocking at all, it was to learn that the man positioned as the CIA’s representative to the congressional body investigating them was William Barr.
The Church Committee produced a classified report specifically on the CIA’s use of academic institutions. That report remains classified, and a search of the public record turns up no FOIA request addressed to CIA and NARA by its specific title that I could find. I am going to file one. Its classified status is the buried foundation of everything that follows.
Now look at what Bill’s father Donald Barr had been building in the years before the Church Committee convened.
Donald Barr served in the OSS beginning in 1941, the wartime intelligence apparatus that became the CIA. He moved into academic administration at Columbia University, where he ran the Science Honors Program with NSF funding. The funding status matters precisely because of what the Church Committee documented: NSF funding was one of the primary mechanisms the CIA used as cover for academic recruitment programs. The Columbia Daily Spectator reported in March 1967, while Barr was still there, that CIA recruiting at Columbia was the most successful of all Ivy League schools. Department heads worked with CIA recruiters to identify and move talented young people through specific institutional channels. Donald Barr was running the program inside the institution where that pipeline was documented as most effective.
How did talent move through it? The birthday letters I documented in an earlier piece show the mechanism specifically. Dr. Stephen Levy identified Epstein as mathematically exceptional when Epstein was approximately ten years old, at Hebrew Academy of Nassau County. Levy was President of Phi Delta Kappa at Columbia University, a professional fraternity positioning him at the exact center of the networks connecting classroom teachers to Columbia’s academic establishment. It seems to me he is the man who flagged Epstein through the system Donald Barr was running. Levy’s birthday letter documents that he identified Epstein’s abilities.
In 1964, Donald Barr left Columbia for Dalton School, describing the position to the press as an offer he couldn’t say no to. He served as headmaster for a decade, giving him direct access to the children of the most powerful families in New York. This included investment bankers, media moguls, foreign policy architects, intelligence officials, and the kinds of people whose family relationships opened doors that credentials alone could not. The Church Committee’s second documented pillar was professional networks as operational cover, and Dalton was a professional network with unparalleled access to American elite family structures.
In February 1974, Barr announced his resignation, and his contract ended June 30, 1974. Jeffrey Epstein began teaching at Dalton in September 1974. It’s said Epstein met Ace Greenberg through his time at Dalton School and moved on to Bear Stearns in 1976, where the firm was already serving Robert Maxwell, Adnan Khashoggi, and the Bronfman family. Epstein made partner in four years, an ascent with no conventional explanation.
What Bear Stearns was training Epstein to do is documented in the birthday letters and the financial records. Elliot Wolk, who worked with Epstein at Bear Stearns in the mid-1970s, writes in his birthday letter that he was running an account for Bob Maxwell and asks Epstein whether that was when Epstein first discovered the Maxwell teenage daughter. The official story places Epstein’s relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell as beginning in 1991 after her father’s death, but Wolk’s letter suggests Epstein had access to the Maxwell family through Bear Stearns in the mid-1970s, when Robert Maxwell was already a client. Robert Maxwell was a documented Mossad asset. When Maxwell died in 1991, six heads of Israeli intelligence attended his state funeral. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Maxwell “has done more for Israel than can today be said.”
Bear Stearns was also managing accounts for Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer central to Iran-Contra, and the Bronfman family, whose patriarch had documented associations with Meyer Lansky. When you are managing money for a Mossad asset, an Iran-Contra arms dealer, and the son of an organized crime figure, you are handling financial infrastructure that supports intelligence operations.
Bear Stearns also had documented relationships with BCCI. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was, at its peak in the 1980s, the seventh largest private bank in the world, with branches in 78 countries. It was also, as investigators would later establish, one of the largest criminal enterprises in financial history. This was a bank deliberately structured to evade regulatory oversight, used by intelligence agencies, arms dealers, drug cartels, and corrupt governments across multiple continents to move money that could not be moved through legitimate institutions. When it finally collapsed in 1991 after regulators in seven countries seized its branches simultaneously, the Kerry Committee spent two years documenting what it had actually been.
Among the findings? BCCI ran a 450-person protocol department with a $6 million annual budget specifically for procuring teenage girls to use as leverage over wealthy and powerful clients.
Yes, that is real.
Bear Stearns cleared $13 billion in transactions through BCCI during Epstein’s tenure at the firm. I personally believe this is the institutional predecessor of what Epstein would later build, his “shadow bank” as I’ve been calling it, and he was training inside the bank that had cleared its transactions.
The Church Committee’s third documented pillar was offshore corporate vehicles as financial infrastructure. The model Epstein was being trained to replicate already had a documented practitioner. Edwin Wilson worked for the CIA from 1956 to 1971, perfecting the model of intelligence front companies that did real, profitable business while serving covert purposes.
From 1971 to 1976, Wilson ran Task Force 157, the Navy’s secret intelligence unit that used business cover for espionage, making over $20 million through these operations. Task Force 157 was dissolved in September 1977. Epstein left Bear Stearns in March 1981 and founded Intercontinental Assets Group in August 1981, the same year the Army created the Intelligence Support Activity to rebuild Task Force 157’s capabilities. His stated business model of recovering embezzled funds for governments and wealthy clients was identical to Wilson’s.
The relationship that made all of this possible at scale was the one Epstein built with Leslie Wexner.
In July 1991, Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney over his entire estate. Attorneys who have reviewed the document say they have never seen anything like it given by one person to another. It gave Epstein what the USVI lawsuit called “unmitigated control” over Wexner’s financial affairs. Wexner transferred his $56 million Manhattan townhouse to Epstein for $0. Epstein oversaw $1.3 billion in stock sales for Wexner. When Wexner later claimed $46 million had been misappropriated, he chose to make that claim publicly rather than file a police report.
That same year, 1991, Epstein was listed as president of Wexner Investment Company and pledged $2 million for a Harvard building named after Henry Rosovsky, the Harvard Corporation member Wexner introduced him to. The Wexner relationship also produced something else. In 1995, Southern Air Transport relocated its headquarters to Columbus, Ohio. Columbus was Wexner’s base of operations. SAT was a publicly acknowledged former CIA proprietary, descended from Air America. It had documented involvement in Iran-Contra weapons transport and DEA records showing it was “of record” for alleged co***ne trafficking from January 1985 to September 1990. Its primary cargo customer at the Columbus hub was Wexner’s The Limited. Two named Ohio law enforcement sources, former Ohio Inspector General David Sturtz and former Franklin County Sheriff Earl Smith, told investigative reporters that Epstein was the point person in bringing SAT to Ohio. On October 1, 1998, SAT filed for bankruptcy on the same day the CIA Inspector General released a report detailing drug trafficking allegations against the airline.
Thread Three: The Protection Architecture
Mary Daly joined FinCEN as Senior Advisor to the Director in February 2019. FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is the Treasury Department division that receives every Suspicious Activity Report filed by American banks. It is where the financial records of crimes go first.
Mary Daly is William Barr’s daughter. And of course we know that William Barr is Donald Barr’s son. So if we put this together, Donald Barr hired Epstein at Dalton in 1974. William Barr joined the CIA the year his father published Space Relations. William Barr became Attorney General twice, at the precise moments when Epstein’s financial architecture was most exposed. And Mary Daly was positioned at the agency that receives bank Suspicious Activity Reports during the period when the most significant SAR in the Epstein investigation arrived.
February 14, 2019: William Barr confirmed as Attorney General.
February 2019: Mary Daly joins FinCEN.
July 6, 2019: Epstein arrested on federal charges.
August 10, 2019: Epstein dies in federal custody.
September 26, 2019: JPMorgan files a SAR flagging over $1 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions, including wire transfers flagging potential human trafficking and transfers to Russian banks. That SAR goes to FinCEN.
According to JPMorgan spokesperson Patricia Wexler, speaking after the SAR was unsealed: “It does not appear that anyone in the government or law enforcement acted on those SARs for years.”
Over $1 billion in suspicious transactions involving potential human trafficking, filed to the agency where the Attorney General’s daughter was a Senior Advisor, and years passed before anyone in law enforcement acted on them.
The pattern of how Bill Barr operates is documented across two separate attorney general tenures, thirty years apart, applied to two separate but connected networks. The method is identical both times: consolidate oversight, narrow the investigation, remove the independent prosecutors, protect the financial architecture.
Barr AG #1, 1991 to 1993.
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International collapsed in 1991. The Kerry Committee had documented its 450-person protocol department procuring teenage girls for wealthy clients. BCCI had been the financial infrastructure for a generation of intelligence operations including Iran-Contra. Barr stonewalled the Kerry Committee’s investigation of BCCI, refused to appoint an independent counsel despite a formal request from the House Judiciary Committee, and issued Christmas Eve pardons for six Iran-Contra figures. The financial architecture survived with the people who built and used it unnamed and uncharged.
Danny Casolaro was a freelance journalist who spent the last two years of his life investigating what he believed was a single hidden network operating beneath multiple American scandals simultaneously. He called it the Octopus. His thesis was that the same group of people, moving through intelligence agencies, private contractors, and financial institutions, were responsible for the Iran-Contra weapons deals, the BCCI money laundering, the theft of a Justice Department software program called PROMIS that could be used to track anyone through any database, and a series of other crimes that official Washington had treated as unrelated.
He had been telling friends and family for months that he was getting close to something enormous, and that if anything happened to him, it would be deliberate. In August 1991, he traveled to Martinsburg, West Virginia to meet a source he believed would give him the final piece.
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh had just resigned that same month, and William Barr had just been named acting Attorney General, stepping into oversight of the very Justice Department investigations Casolaro was tracking.
Danny was found dead in his hotel bathtub on August 10, 1991. His notes and research materials were gone and his death was ruled a su***de. The investigation into the Octopus ended with him, and the network he was tracing, the same BCCI infrastructure Barr was simultaneously burying at the Justice Department, survived intact.
Barr AG #2, 2019 to 2020.
Geoffrey Berman was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan that has historically operated with more independence from Washington than any other US Attorney’s office in the country. SDNY, as it is known, is where the most significant federal financial crime cases get prosecuted, and it was Berman’s office that finally arrested Epstein in July 2019, moving around the channels where the protection had always been intact. Barr had recused himself from the Epstein case, citing a conflict through Kirkland and Ellis, the law firm where he had been a partner and which had represented Epstein in earlier proceedings. He then reversed that recusal within days of the arrest, stepped back into oversight, shut down the NYPD’s parallel investigation, shut down the New Mexico investigation into Zorro Ranch (Epstein’s 8,000-acre property) where victims had described assaults and where law enforcement had been blocked from conducting a full search. He then went on to fired Geoffrey Berman himself, and structured the Maxwell prosecution to produce a conviction with zero financial charges, zero firsthand grand jury witnesses, and twenty-five secret deals with co-conspirators whose identities were withheld from Maxwell’s own defense attorneys.
Epstein died on August 10, 2019, in a federal jail cell where the cameras had failed, the guards had fallen asleep, and the cellmate who had been placed with him was inexplicably removed the night before.
I keep coming back to this though because it was just odd: the same calendar date, thirty years apart, the same Attorney General’s institutional reach, and two men who both knew where the financial architecture led. Danny Casolaro on August 10, 1991. Jeffrey Epstein on August 10, 2019.
The financial architecture survived intact, the twenty-five co-conspirators were never named, and the Chain Reaction memo, a 69-page document tracing the complete Epstein financial network that Congress subpoenaed from the Justice Department, is being personally blocked from being delivered to the House Oversight Committee by Todd Blanche, who serves as Deputy Attorney General and who, in a remarkable collision of roles, also personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell and personally led the internal review that cleared Donald Trump of any Epstein connections.
Scott Bessent, the current Treasury Secretary, has refused three separate Senate requests to release $1.08 billion in Epstein Suspicious Activity Reports filed by JPMorgan. Maurene Comey, the lead federal prosecutor on the Maxwell case and daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, was fired in July 2025 before she could pursue the financial threads the case had left open. Maxwell herself answered nothing at her congressional deposition in February 2026, invoking the Fifth Amendment through the entire proceeding. The 200,000 pages of documents that the White House has placed behind executive privilege, the legal doctrine that allows a president to shield communications and records from outside scrutiny, remain sealed.
The privilege architecture blocking those 200,000 pages was built by Pat Cipollone, a Washington attorney who served as Barr’s assistant at the Justice Department from 1992 to 1993, during the final year of the BCCI suppression, and who then served as White House Counsel to Donald Trump from 2018 through January 2021. This means he was the president’s chief legal adviser through the entire period of the Epstein investigation, Epstein’s death, the Maxwell prosecution, and the congressional investigations that followed. He is now a Partner at Torridon Law, the private law firm William Barr founded in late 2022.
Torridon is not a conventional law firm. It was built around a specific set of former government officials with specific institutional knowledge of the exact investigations and documents that remain most sensitive to the Epstein network, and Bloomberg has reported that access to the Trump administration is among its key selling points to clients.
While Trump signed executive orders specifically targeting other law firms for their work on cases he opposed, directing federal agencies to revoke their security clearances and cut off their government contracts, Torridon operates without any such scrutiny and has been described as having privileged access to the current administration.
The rest of the firm tells the same story.
Patrick Philbin was Cipollone’s deputy at the White House through the entire Epstein investigation period and is now a Partner at Torridon.
Tim Shea was the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration during the period when the Chain Reaction memo, which traces Epstein’s financial network and its connections to drug trafficking channels, was being assembled and subsequently suppressed. He also advised Barr specifically on Bureau of Prisons policy changes in the aftermath of Epstein’s death. He signed the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, in an unusual procedural move where a single official signed alone rather than through the standard chain of command. He is now Of Counsel at Torridon.
Jeff Jensen was the federal prosecutor Barr personally assigned to conduct an internal review of the Flynn prosecution, a review that concluded the case should be dropped despite a guilty plea Flynn had already entered. Jensen recommended dismissal, briefed Barr on his findings, and said publicly when joining Torridon that he was “beyond honored to once again work with General Barr.” He is now a Partner.
Richard Cullen served as special counsel to Senator Paul Trible, a Virginia Republican who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the Iran-Contra investigation in 1987, meaning Cullen was directly tasked with investigating the predecessor network that Barr later buried with his Christmas Eve pardons. He then spent decades as one of Washington’s most prominent private attorneys, representing Mike Pence through the Mueller investigation and the January 6 committee proceedings. He joined Glenn Youngkin’s office as counselor to the governor of Virginia. Youngkin, before entering politics, was the co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm co-founded by David Rubenstein that manages roughly $400 billion in assets and has historically served as a revolving door between Washington power and private capital. Epstein was actively pursuing Rubenstein through Boris Nikolic, the Gates Foundation science advisor who appears throughout the Epstein archive, texting Nikolic in August 2012: “no response from rubenstein. i will wait until the 29th sept.” Cullen is now a Partner at Torridon, alongside Barr.
Kimberly Breier served for more than a decade in the US intelligence community as an analyst focused on Latin America and was Mike Pompeo’s Western Hemisphere chief at the State Department during the Trump administration. Pompeo served as CIA Director and then as Secretary of State and has extensive intelligence community relationships across the same Latin American networks where Epstein’s trafficking operations had documented South American connections. Breier resigned from the State Department on August 8, 2019, two days before Epstein died. She is now a Senior Advisor at Torridon alongside Pompeo, who is Of Counsel.
Here is why all of this matters together. Ghislaine Maxwell filed a habeas petition in federal court in December 2025. A habeas petition is a legal filing that challenges the lawfulness of a person’s imprisonment, and Maxwell’s petition made a specific claim: that twenty-nine men made secret deals with the Justice Department, twenty-five settlements and four agreements with people who were never charged at all, and that these deals were withheld from her defense team during her trial. The identities of those twenty-nine men remain sealed. The people who know exactly what those deals contained and how they were structured are the people who were inside the Justice Department when the deals were made. Those people are assembled at Torridon. That specific institutional knowledge lives nowhere else, and the clients who most need access to it know exactly where to find it.
The Convergence: Where the Three Threads Tie
The place where all three converge is Space Relations, published in 1973 by Donald Barr.
The plot really makes this obvious in hindsight. It’s about a class of extraordinarily wealthy people who have established a planet that exists outside the jurisdiction of any government. They purchase human beings and sexually enslave them there. The sovereign class answers to nothing but its own will. The mineral the slaves are forced to mine is called weinsteinite. Yes, it’s really fu***ng called WEINSTEINite. I don’t mean to throw out a curse word, but you cannot make this s**t up.
Donald Barr published this novel one year before Epstein arrived at Dalton, in the same year his son William joined the CIA, while he was still running a school that gave him direct access to the children of Manhattan’s most powerful families, after spending a decade building the program the Church Committee would document as the CIA’s most successful Ivy League recruiting infrastructure.
A man who helped build the real infrastructure, whose son spent fifty years protecting it, published a detailed design document in 1973 for what that infrastructure was ultimately for. He published it as a description of what a specific class of people understood was possible: a planet outside law, a sovereign class, people purchased and used, and accountability answering only to the class itself.
The construction is happening now, at a scale that requires no island. It uses communications infrastructure above national regulatory reach, financial infrastructure outside state control, and data systems collecting emergency call information across half the country. And then there is the physical territory off-planet, where the man funding the rockets has said explicitly that Earth law will apply only insofar as the people there decide it does.
The suppression runs alongside the construction because both are the same project. Building a replacement governance structure requires insulating the financing from the oversight mechanisms of the existing one.
Barr’s function, both times he served as Attorney General, was to protect the construction phase from the exposure that would have ended it. Could Torridon be what manages the transition period? The documents being held behind privilege are covering the map of who is funding the next phase.
What Can Still Force Accountability
Maxwell’s habeas petition is moving through the Southern District of New York, the same federal court where her criminal case was prosecuted, and if it reaches the discovery phase, the twenty-nine sealed men face legal process for the first time. I am tracking that docket and will report as it develops.
The Chain Reaction memo can be requested by name directly from the DEA through a Freedom of Information Act request. Filing creates a paper trail and starts a legal clock that forces a response. I will be working on filing one.
The Church Committee’s classified report on the CIA’s use of academic institutions has sat classified for fifty years. A FOIA request addressed to the CIA and the National Archives by its specific title appears to be missing from the public record entirely. I am also working on filing one here. I can’t imagine I will get anything but we have to try.
The $1.08 billion in Suspicious Activity Reports is being held at Treasury rather than at the Justice Department, which means the FOIA pathway runs directly to FinCEN, the Treasury division that received them, rather than through DOJ where the blocking has been concentrated.
A search of federal court dockets through the PACER system, which is the public database for federal court filings, covering the Southern District and Eastern District of New York from 2023 forward and searching for Torridon Law PLLC as counsel of record, would show whether Torridon is already representing parties with documented Epstein exposure. This requires a PACER account. If you have one and want to help, please dig in!
I am not done. I have so much more to break down but I am feeling like I see the forest through the trees finally. The questions that remain are the ones the people in this report have spent decades making sure stayed unasked, and that is exactly why we need to ask them loudly. And TOGETHER!
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By Kait Justice, see comments for sources & to support her work.
