Federal judge: Epstein’s death dashes women’s hopes to toss secret pact

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra said Epstein’s death means he can’t throw out a once-secret agreement that allowed the 66-year-old financier to escape federal prosecution.

by Jane Musgrave
Palm Beach Daily Post, Sept. 16, 2019

WEST PALM BEACH — When convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a New York City jail cell last month, a lawsuit his victims filed to expose federal prosecutors’ mishandling of his case died with him, a federal judge ruled Monday.

In a 15-page order, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra said Epstein’s death means he can’t throw out a once-secret agreement that allowed the 66-year-old financier to escape federal prosecution for sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls at his Palm Beach mansion.

“As a result of Mr. Epstein’s death, there can be no criminal prosecution against him and the Court cannot consider granting this relief to the victims,” Marra wrote.

Further, while the controversial non-prosecution agreement also gave immunity to four women and unnamed others who helped the politically-connected millionaire recruit, groom or use teens for sex, Marra said he can’t waive the protection they received.

Source: https://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/20190916/federal-judge-epsteinrsquos-death-dashes--womenrsquos-hopes-to-toss-secret-pact

Steven Mnuchin’s Mysterious Link to Creepy Epstein Model Scout

The Treasury secretary’s name shows up on official records for a company formed in the 1980s by Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, the model scout Jean-Luc Brunel.

Emily Shugerman
Daily Beast, Gender Reporter, Updated 09.16.19 7:57AM ET, Published 09.15.19

In the late 1980s—before he was a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, or even a high-rolling hedge-fund manager—Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin served in an official capacity for a business run by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most infamous associates.

In official records, Mnuchin is listed as the official state point of contact for Next Management Corporation, a company formed in 1988 by modeling-industry insiders Jean-Luc Brunel and Arnaud Brunel. At the time, Jean-Luc Brunel had just been the subject of a 60 Minutes documentary accusing him of drugging and raping at least three models. Later, he would be accused by two women of supplying girls to Epstein to be sexually abused. (Brunel has denied the allegations.)

Records accessed by The Daily Beast list Mnuchin as the New York Department of State process for Next Management Corporation. According to department officials, the DOS process is the person who files a company’s registration papers and receives lawsuits and other official documents on their behalf—usually a lawyer or some other legal representative.

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Mnuchin’s office did confirm that he was longtime friends with Faith Kates, the owner of the Next modeling agency. The Brunel brothers co-founded the Next agency with Kates in 1989, and their company, Next Management Corp., owned a 25 percent stake in the agency for several years. The address listed under Mnuchin’s name in the state department records is the first address for Kates’ company, Next Management Company.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/steven-mnuchins-mysterious-link-to-creepy-epstein-model-scout-jean-luc-brunel?ref=scroll

Bill Barr: The “Cover-Up General”

"At the center of the criticism is the chief artic­ulator of Bush's imperial presidency," we reported in 1992, "the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad"

by FRANK SNEPP
The Village Voice, APRIL 18, 2019

Snip...

For the next two years, as chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Coun­sel, Barr played a key role in shaping Rich­ard Thornburgh’s stormy tenure as attorney general. In a job that was essentially politi­cal, he helped maintain the administra­tion’s ideological purity by screening out judicial candidates who weren’t conserva­tive enough. He also drafted two key docu­ments rationalizing the U.S. invasion of Panama and the seizure of General Manuel Noriega.

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In mid 1990, as Thornburgh’s own prob­lems with Congress deepened, Barr was tapped to run interference, and was named deputy attorney general. The appointment came just in time for him to draft another landmark tract for the administration, the legal pretext for the undeclared war against Iraq. It would have made any Nixonite proud. Explaining it later to Congress, Barr said he believed there was a “gray zone” between a declared offensive war and an emergency defensive action where “there is latitude for the president, if he believes that the vital interests of the United States are threatened by foreign military attack, there is room for him to respond.”

Barr did not make clear how the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait equaled an attack on vital American interests, but to his credit, at the moment of decision itself, he did counsel the president to soften the impact of his unilateral rush to war by seeking a declaration of congressional support. That piece of advice, much akin to Johnson’s leveraging of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, helped to keep the naysayers at bay.

Barr’s service to the administration, how­ever, wasn’t limited simply to such flashes of political savvy. In 1991 he became active in stone-walling the Iraqgate and the BCCI investigations and further gratified conser­vatives by keeping up the tattoo on their favorite hot-button issues. Embracing im­migration policy as his own, he helped craft an exception rule that automatically barred HIV-positive sufferers from entering the country. Civil libertarians charged illegal discrimination and even racism, since many of those excluded were black Hai­tians. Barr assured Congress that the policy was meant only to keep out people who might be thrown back on public welfare.

Flogging another conservative hobby­horse, Barr fought hard as deputy AG to keep federal courts from expanding their right to review state criminal convictions on writs of habeas corpus. As a devout Catholic, he also pandered to the antiabor­tion crowd, even “torquing” the law in Au­gust 1991 to advance their crusade. The challenge came when a federal judge in Wichita issued an order barring anti-abor­tion demonstrators from blocking access to a clinic. The Justice Department inter­vened to try to force a lifting of the ban. Later asked about this by Congress, Barr gave an exquisitely technical rationale, as­serting that though the demonstrators were “lawbreakers . . . treading on other people’s rights,” they “should be dealt with” in state court, not federal court — thus the federal judge’s order was unenforceable.

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https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/04/18/attorney-general-william-barr-is-the-best-reason-to-vote-for-clinton/

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?

By James Hatfield

Editor's note: In light of last week's horrific events and the Bush administration's reaction to them, we are reprising the following from the last column Jim Hatfield wrote for Online Journal prior to his tragic death on July 18:

July 3, 2001—There may be fireworks in Genoa, Italy, this month, too.

A plot by Saudi master terrorist, Osama bin Laden, to assassinate Dubya during the July 20 economic summit of world leaders, was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's international terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April.

German intelligence services have stated that bin Laden is covertly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to launch another terrorist attack at a high-profile American target—his first since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October.

According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, the attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives.

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill, Dubya, his former business partner?

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http://web.archive.org/web/20060906150015/http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html