The Epstein emails are everywhere, for good reason. I like more structural interpretations of this situation, that the neoliberal era produced it’s own money/sex/violence scandal, as previous regimes had, expressing an essence of its beating little poison heart.

In the dismantling of a world-system alternative to capitalism post-1989, the “Epstein Class” emerged as a kind of synecdoche for how the ruling class operated, using non-government syndicates to get things done, wealthy men acting as nodes in a self-appointed network rooted in their self-importance, lack of boundaries or moral/ethical guardrails, and the absence of any structural barriers to contain their hubris. The currency of this network was pedophilia and rape.

Someone online made a gmail drone website to search and read the email documents, called jmail.world. I decided to search the term “municipal” to see if anything public financey would come up. Sure enough there were some interesting things.

Most of the emails I found were daily investment updates from Richard Kahn at Morgan Stanley. Nothing all that interesting—just mass emails that reported on a few municipal investment funds.

Something interesting about this, though, comes up in an email from Harry Beller, Epstein’s long-time accountant, who asked Janet E. Young, a vice president at Morgan Stanley’s Private Bank, whether any monies in the “Epstein relationship” qualified for a Treasury program extending insurance protections for mutual funds in 2009 as the financial crisis ripped through markets.

Some amount of Epstein’s money was held in “JPM New York Municipal Money Market Fund” and “JPM Tax Free Money Market,” money market funds that held municipal bonds, whose interest, under federal law, is tax free (I think one of these was known as “triple tax free,” meaning it was exempt from local, state, and federal taxes). This is the country’s version of public infrastructure policy: to make the interest payments from subnational governments to wealthy bondholders tax free, encouraging investment in public projects like schools.

When Beller confirmed that this money market fund was insured under the Treasury’s temporary program extension he wrote to Epstein and said “Jeffrey, This is good, Harry.”

Reporting has shown that JPMorgan did massive amounts of business with Epstein between 1990 and 2013: “processed more than 4,700 transactions for Epstein, which totaled more than $1.1 billion and included payments to his victims.”

Apparently people at the bank flagged his transactions, but upper-level staff quashed the concerns: “The bank’s general counsel also concluded that Epstein was a reputational risk in 2011, but did not insist that he be removed, according to the outlet.”

Janet E. Young didn’t seem to mind in 2009, a few years after Epstein was charged in 2008. I think it’s interesting to put all this in context, since Epstein got a deal with prosecutors by pleading guilty to underage prostitution in June 2008, right before the shit hit the fan with the financial crisis.

His money was tied up in these tax-free municipal funds at the Private Bank, which was Morgan Stanley’s arm of services to the ultra-weathy. Interesting to see the municipal bond market’s tax exemption come into play in Epstein’s most significant banking relationship. When we think about who owns municipal bonds, among them were Epstein and his ilk.

University of Cumbria?

Another thread was a long chain with Jem Brendall, in 2012, a professor of sustainability who was literally in a session at the World Economic Forum while he was emailing Epstein about setting up a potential scheme involving “community exchanges” for alternative currencies in the Global South, through the University of Cumbria. I’m interested here because of the university connection, but also the alternative public finance. Here’s the introductory email.

The youtube link still works. Here’s this smooth guy talking about what he does with software that creates local currencies in India, pitching digital currencies as alternatives during in the wake of the financial crisis. It’s a kind of private digital currency for municipal projects and international development, focusing on sustainability.

He says in this TedTalk how “people aren’t really investing in this at the moment…” He needed money. Imagine being a professor that trucks in sustainability for ‘developing’ countries in 2012 and then setting up an account through a US nonprofit so Epstein, who’d been charged with prostitution of a minor in 2008, can invest in your venture.

Bendell found a nonprofit for Epstein. He was texting Epstein about all this at the WEC and told him about the US nonprofit to funnel money through, using the University as the fiscal arbiter.

Bendall and Epstein put together a workshop on this scheme, and the former pitched a formal invite that Epstein would finance.

But Epstein ghosted him I think. There aren’t any other responses I’m seeing.

"Municipal finance for poor related projects”

Finally, this one caught my eye:

Apparently someone who used the email afrixp@hotmail.com connected with Epstein around “organizing things,” including how “Gates now wants to send a [team] to you to organize municipal finance for poor related projects.” I wonder what this project was exactly, and who this person was that Bill Gates was going to connect with?

So I searched for “afrixp” and found other emails with the same handle, but a different email account, this time a gmail (“afri.xp”). In an email asking Epstein for a recommendation for a lawyer to prosecute Wikileaks, he signs it Karim Wade. In these emails, Epstein is named as “Friend of Sultan.”

Here’s what Wade is complaining about: being accused by the US state department, via reports from a diplomat, of selling Senegalese government bonds to make money on telecomm deals.

Wade was a player. In an email to Larry Summers, Epstein explains that Wade is the Senegalese president’s son one of the most important people in West Africa. At the time, Wade was in exile in Qatar, which means that Epstein knew the Sultan of Qatar and was connected to Wade through him.

The Gambia Journal reports that Karim Wade is still a controversial figure in Senegalese politics. One imagines that the municipal projects are international development projects in this case, perhaps involving Senegalese government bonds.

When I search for “bonds,” and so much comes up, wow, it’d be a whole project. The same thing for “school.” But it’s worth it, since in doing this, the networks of the neoliberal social structure, and this Epstein Class, swarm into visibility in an interesting way.