“The Same People Keep Meeting And Nothing Happens!”

It’s been a while since Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, author of The Last Pioneer, and I caught up.

I’ve been sitting in a courtroom listening to the pre-trial hearings in the case of Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, for what feels like eternity, even though it’s only been three weeks.

The headlines regarding talks with Russia and Ukraine seem to be the same as they were when the hearings began.

Jared Kushner has entered the fray. He and Steve Witkoff will be meeting this weekend with Russian counterparts in Miami. This follows meetings with the Ukrainians; more meetings with Russians; and so on…

It feels a bit like groundhog day – and, according to Mikhail it is! Unless, he says, the US invades Venezuela, which is, reportedly, what Tucker Carlson is either prophesying or threatening…

The price of oil is the one thing that might pressure Putin to do…..something. Otherwise, says Mikhail, he has no incentive to stop the war. The war is the mechanism by which he is able to control his country.

Mikhail also explains that when Putin described the European leaders, Ukraine’s allies as “piggys’ or “little pigs” the insult was worse than might be realized by Westerners.

And he gets into the court case that has got Russians all riled up against the judicial system….

And much, much more!!!

Watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Adam Klasfeld And I Chew On The Luigi Mangione Pre-Trial Hearings

Thank you, as always to Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News, for a great conversation!

Watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Take-Aways From The Luigi Mangione Hearings

Hey Everyone,

Apologies for the silence this week. I’ve been busy!

As you know, together with James Patterson, I am writing a book on the murder of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, who was shot dead in the middle of Manhattan on December 4th last year, allegedly by Luigi Mangione. I’m not going to share any of my exclusive reporting here, obviously, but I will give you my knee-jerk takeaways from the courtroom because what happened there is public.

I was at the kick-off of pre-trial hearings in which Mangione’s defense team is arguing that the contents of Mangione’s backpack (the gun, and the “manifesto” among them) should be inadmissible at trial, because he was locked into conversation with the arresting officers at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania, before being read his Miranda rights, and his backpack was searched without a warrant.

Prosecutors are said to be bringing as many as 28 witnesses, which means, if we move at the current pace, these hearings could go on until Christmas.

Last week we saw on video that by the time Mangione was cuffed and brought out to a police car, a staggering total of 14 law enforcement officers had arrived on the scene. Prosecutors are trying to show that this was because the lead arresting officer, Patrolman Joseph Detwiler, had instantly recognized Mangione as the same person whose features were all over the news in the wake of Thompson’s murder, and that Detwiler also knew from (Fox) news that the murder weapon had not been found. In other words, their point is: the Altoona PD doesn’t normally call 14 officers to a scene for a case of a fake id, which is the official reason they were able to detain Mangione.

In court, we are currently watching the scene of the arrest from an assortment of different police bodycams, so while it’s generally fascinating, parts of it are very repetitive.

What this means for me personally, is that a. I will never be able to forget the very unappealing, sterile interior of this particular McDonalds – white tiled walls with a mustard yellow stripe that runs horizontally at the level of Mangione’s head. And b. I keep humming all the kitschy Christmas music that was being piped out while the arrest was going on!

More seriously, my chief thought so far, is this:

Read my chief thoughts so far on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Anand Giridharadas Has Read Through ALL The Epstein Emails

Yesterday, I reached out to the journalist Anand Giridharadas because he wrote a superb guest essay in the New York Times about what the latest batch of Epstein emails tells us about the true nature of the elites who comprise “The Epstein Class”. I recommend everyone read it. (It’s so good, I’ve read it multiple times).

In it, he lays out vividly how Jeffrey Epstein was able to conduct a global orchestra of plutocrats, who cared not a jot that the man who was summoning them to dinner, or to lunch, or to the Middle East, was a convicted sex offender. He shows how these guys (and they were mostly guys) sought Epstein out for contacts, for insider information of any sort, for, in a word, “edge’. And that the person with the greatest “edge” of all was Epstein, the man-in-the-middle, whose poor spelling and grammar, was probably a deliberately manipulative mind-fuck, designed to keep them all beneath him in the shallow hierarchy on this lofty plane.

You can watch our conversation above. And, yes, I’ll take Anand’s compliment: “You’re one of the only people whose name turns up in the Epstein emails in a way that makes you look better rather than worse because they’re worried about you.”

“They’re worried about you….” That’s a phrase I think all investigative journalists want to hear regarding people in power who are hiding nefarious things.

It’s cold comfort, given the hideousness of the crimes Epstein committed over so many years, but if, as it appears, I caused him even a few seconds of angst, then…good.

Watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

“For The First Time We Felt People Cared About Us”

Hey Everyone,

I caught up with artist and Epstein survivor, Rina Oh, just back from what turned out to be a momentous trip to Washington DC. Just hours after the survivors gave a stirring press conference on the steps of the Capitol, both the House and Senate voted to release the Epstein files. And, earlier this evening, President Trump signed the bill. It is, as Oh, says a “victory”.

In our interview Oh details what the extraordinary, historic 48 hours was like; she describes how kind various members of the House of Representatives were to the survivors; but, also, how complicated inter-relations between the Epstein survivors sometimes is. This is something I’ve talked about repeatedly. The Epstein story is messier than people would like it to be.

In April I wrote how Oh is suing the estate of Virginia Giuffre over alleged defamation around Giuffre’s response to Oh’s assertion that Giuffre assaulted her in Epstein’s massage room. (Giuffre, you’ll remember, was frank in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, about the fact that she recruited and abused other women and girls for Epstein. She even forgot about one of them – Carolyn Andriano, who stood up in court at Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial and described what happened to her at Virginia’s hands. Giuffre doesn’t mention Oh in her book).

Andriano died of an overdose in 2023, and Oh says she is making a bronze sculpture in her memory.

In our interview Oh goes back down memory lane, and explains how Epstein dangled money, job security, and even a studio, to help her burgeoning career as an artist, and to keep her coming back to his New York town house, and to his home in Palm Beach. It’s a tale that is, unfortunately, all too familiar, at this point.

She explains the fear she felt when he had an art work picked up at her parents’ home, because he now had her address, and she felt trapped and unable to speak out about what happened for years.

It’s a reminder that we must never forget that the point of releasing the Epstein files, is not for either party to score political points, but to ensure that the institutional power that propped Epstein up for so long, is never enabled again for such a ghastly purpose.

Wacth the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

SPECIAL REPORT: First Vote To Release The Epstein Files

For those who missed it: watch our live panel discussion around the historic, almost unanimous House vote to release the Epstein files!

Wacth the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Is Trump’s Reluctance To Release The Epstein Files To Do With Money, Not Sex?

The Epstein files did not tell me much I did not already know, although I must say I was astonished at the low-brow water-cooler gossip from people who have high-brow jobs. Why certain high-profile people wasted time typing anything to Epstein, let alone wondering such unlikely things as, for example, if Donald Trump has a cocaine habit, is beyond me. (Trump famously disapproves of drugs and alcohol because of the early tragic demise of his brother, Fred).

But I was intrigued to read of Epstein’s seeming obsession with Trump – a man whose character and psychology he claimed to know well – and yet to whom he had no access after 2004. Instead, Epstein appears to have relied on Steve Bannon and Trump’s biographer, Michael Wolff, for any inside information on what was going on in the Trump White House. (Predictably, he parlayed this “inside knowledge” to the Russians and presumably anyone else he thought he could sucker into paying him.)

But why did Epstein remain so obsessed with Trump for years after their relationship was over?

That’s the question that nagged me while reading these emails in which Epstein and his friend group discusses Trump more than anyone – or anything – else.

Watch and read my thoughts on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Mikhail Zygar’s New Book Is Out!

Hey Everyone,

Yes: I have plenty to say about the latest Epstein files dump from the House Oversight Committee.

Standby for that.

But yesterday was book launch day for Mikhail Zygar. His highly readable book: The Dark Side Of The Earth: Russia’s Short-lived victory over Totalitarianism is available here.

This is not some heavy, didactic tome. It’s the interwoven personal stories of many of some of the biggest names to have emerged in the last fifty years of Russian history. Through the messiness of humanity, we see how it was that when communism ended, democracy failed to take its place.

Mikhail tells me that he has got a plan to get the book inside Russia – where he has been sentenced in absentia to imprisonment for eight-and-a-half years.

One day, I hope he will write his memoir, because that is an almost unbelievable story.

Watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

A “Hot Girl for Zohran” Explains How New York’s Mayoral Race Saved Her Life…

To a Gen Xer like me, Abril Rios, 26, looks like she has it all: she’s been a model since childhood; she was privately educated; she has a good college degree; and nearly 170,000 followers on Instagram.

But, in our interview, Abril explains that like most of her Gen Z peers, until this year she was wallowing in loneliness and apathy. Each time she posted something to her mass audience, she felt even more isolated. The unreality of her online “friends” hit her afresh. She also felt that no matter how much she tried – and she really tried – she couldn’t launch a career or get a decent job. And, not unrelatedly, she felt she wasn’t respected by people who were older. People who were Gen X like me and her parents.

Enter – on her social media page – Zohran Mamdani. She’d never heard of him but there was the New York mayoral candidate rushing into the waves on a beach, and riding the subway. It spoke to her.

She joined his “Hot Girl” group of supporters – she says the term is gender neutral, deliberately ironic and provocative – and suddenly she found purpose and friends. She took part in his scavenger hunts; the on-line group, arranged to meet off-line. She made friends; she felt seen; she felt heard; she felt respected.

She was so enervated she became the chair of Hot Girls for New Jersey and campaigned for four local candidates.

And now, she says, buoyed up by their success on Tuesday, Zohran’s “Hot Girls” are planning to expand and go national.

They are already gearing up for the mid-terms. She’s so busy, that she doesn’t want to date. Many of her friends feel similarly. Politics is more than a passion. It’s an identity.

When she thinks back to her life a year ago, it feel like she’s thinking about someone different.

“I was going in such a dead end like path. And now I see such a beautiful future ahead of me. So I’m so grateful, honestly….It saved my life.”

You can read Abril’s substack here.

Watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.

Jared Kushner And Steve Witkoff Need To Keep On “Bibi-Sitting”…

My guest yesterday was Joel Rubin, former senior State Department official under President Obama, expert on the Middle East, author of The Briefing Book, here on substack, and much else

Joel stressed how vital it is that the US continues to apply pressure on both sides to hold the line that was defined and signed at Sharm-el-Sheikh.

After the recent bombing on Gaza by Israel, followed by a “resumption’ of the ceasefire, it’s also imperative, Joel says, that the arbiters of the agreement, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, spend as much time in the region as possible. (So far, they have).

We talked about the roles played by Kushner and Witkoff in getting us to this point.

When it comes to Kushner, I believe two things can be true simultaneously. I stand by my reporting in Kushner, Inc. on the appearance of Kushner’s conflicts while conducting foreign policy in the first Trump administration.

But ironically, without those conflicts, would he have been able to pull off first the Abraham Accords and now this ceasefire?

Lesley Stahl asked Kushner a question about his apparent conflicts on Sixty Minutes (a great get by the way, for the new CBS chief, Bari Weiss) and his answer was essentially that those deep business ties are exactly what enabled him to pull off what many of us consider a miracle.

So, that’s thought-provoking. Do the ends justify the means? Well, in this case, maybe.

And, as for the reported conversation between Kushner, Witkoff and Khalil al-Hayya, the lead negotiator for Hamas? Well, Joel and I got into how completely unprecedented that was.

The fact that Witkoff found a way to connect with al-Hayya through the fact that they’d both lost their sons – Witkoff’s to a drug overdose, al-Hayya in the recent Israeli attack on Doha – is both poignant – and of course, tactically smart.

Figuring out how to connect with someone on the other side of the table about something that seems beside the point of the talks, is something many politicians think they know how to do, but it’s an essential skill for real estate developers in competitive markets like New York where both Kushner and Witkoff have worked.

Joel and I also talk about how Trump’s tariff policy has given him a reason to engage with world leaders with a velocity that perhaps he might not otherwise have had.

We move on to discuss the mayoral election in New York. Joel was the Jewish director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2020, so I was very curious to get his thoughts on the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani.

Joel explains that Mamdani’s sweeping primary victory means that there’s a complete recalibration going on in Democrat politics about the issue of Israel-Palestine.

“[If you a Democrat candidate and] if you’re, you know, to the right on Israel-Palestine, it will cost in the primary,” he says, adding: “We’re in a new baseline right now.”

I’ll say.

Watch the full conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates.