How Jeffrey Epstein Used Philanthropy to Worm His Way Into Powerful Circles

As the world now knows, one of the more surprising names to have popped up around Jeffrey Epstein is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. It’s been reported that Gates flew on Epstein’s plane at least once and visited his home on several occasions. More recently, the media has been rife with speculation that one of the causes of Gates’s divorce from his wife Melinda was his relationship with Epstein. But the depth of their friendship is not fully known.

When I asked a spokesperson for the Gates Foundation how the two men met, I was told that many people encouraged Gates to meet with Epstein, suggesting that he could bring enormous resources to critical health initiatives.

Gates touched on the subject himself at a New York Times Dealbook conference in 2019. “I made a mistake in judgment in that I thought those discussions would lead literally to billions of dollars going to global health. Turned out that was a bad judgment, that was a mirage,” he said, adding, “I gave him some benefit by the association.”

One of the questions that I hear repeatedly is: How on earth could someone like Gates ever have been exposed to Jeffrey Epstein after he was convicted as a sex offender. (Epstein was prosecuted on state charges of soliciting a prostitute and a minor in 2008.)

Difficult as this is to swallow, what I learned talking to people who worked with or around the financier is that part of Epstein’s genius (I hate to use that word, but it’s appropriate) was manipulation. In particular, he had a unique ability to use philanthropy as a tool to worm his way into circles where he otherwise might not have been invited.

Over and over again Epstein found a human conduit—usually a scientist or researcher—whom he would manipulate into helping him gain entrance to a world, that under any other circumstances, would or should be closed to him. This of course is the dark side of philanthropy, the part that few people want to talk about, but, talk to enough of the scientists who got to know Epstein and they will tell you, it is its Achilles heel.

To hear about the people Epstein used to gain access, tune into Chasing Ghislaine starting on July 15.

The Venomous Epstein Tapes

Ghislaine Maxwell and I crossed paths soon after I moved to New York in 1997.

Though she was a few years older than me, we were both English, Oxbridge-educated and would sometimes be invited to the same parties. She was pin-thin, expensively dressed, funny, fun, clever, worldly and the effortless centre of attention.

She talked about sex a lot — and she liked to behave outrageously. During one Manhattan dinner I heard about, she told a British movie star to lie face-down on the floor; she jumped on his back and gave him a massage right there on the ground in front of everyone. Even as people laughed, one observer wondered if what she was doing was not inappropriate.

Usually, she was by herself. I had no idea whether or not she had a boyfriend.

But then, in the autumn of 2002, I was assigned to write an article for Vanity Fair magazine about an intriguing and very rich man called Jeffrey Epstein. I soon discovered that Ghislaine had had a complicated relationship with Epstein for over a decade.

They didn’t live together, I was told. Some sources claimed she worked for him — although Epstein later denied this. He insisted they were not romantically involved, instead telling me she was his best friend.

What struck me as strange was that at the start of my reporting I’d bumped into Ghislaine at a friend’s baby shower: and when I mentioned I was writing the article, she started to cry.

At the time I put it down to how unequal their relationship seemed. I’d heard she loved him and he did not love her back.

She wanted to marry him and have children, sources told me — though she had insisted otherwise. Meanwhile, he wanted to stay single and sleep with (many) other women, which he certainly did.

And Ghislaine, according to the sources, put up with this — they presumed because Epstein could provide her with the same lavish lifestyle she’d grown up with as the daughter of the late and crooked media mogul Robert Maxwell.

After his bizarre death in 1991, Robert’s children (two of whom were accused but cleared of aiding their father’s crime) were left — at least officially — more or less penniless. So, Epstein looked after Ghislaine financially, in return for her introducing him to the glitterati. That was the mythology.

But when I toured Epstein’s house in 2002, 11 years after Robert Maxwell’s death, there were photos everywhere of another ex-girlfriend, former Miss Sweden Ava Andersson Dubin — but none that I saw of his ‘best friend’ Ghislaine.

I asked him about this and he brushed it aside, saying there were ‘lots of photos of lots of people’ in the house.

My 2002 article was on Epstein’s money. No one knew how he’d become so rich: he lived in what was said to be Manhattan’s biggest private townhouse, a nine-storey mansion.

He had a huge ranch in New Mexico, an island in the Caribbean and his own Boeing 727 — on which he had recently flown Bill Clinton to Africa.

Adding to the mystery, he rarely went out. It was said, instead, that wealthy and powerful people came to him — he claimed to manage the fortunes of billionaires.

Our numerous phone calls as we arranged the interview — which was to be off-the-record, meaning I couldn’t quote him — had shown me I was dealing with a mercurial control freak.

And he was true to form. He made a point of eating the sandwiches laid out for his ‘tea’, one by one, without offering me anything, despite the fact I was pregnant.

He had also left out a copy of a lurid book by the notorious French libertine the Marquis de Sade for me to notice on his desk.

We spoke for some time, and I left. Afterwards, weirdly, his assistant phoned me to tell me he’d thought I was ‘pretty’. A messenger delivered a book to me at my home address: ‘Maths For Dummies’. (I’d told Epstein I hadn’t studied maths since I was 14.)

I was creeped out: I hadn’t given him my home address — Vanity Fair’s was easy enough to find — and the flattery was crass.

Then, even more uncomfortably, he began to bombard me with phone calls. These went on daily for months. From their tone — alternately smarmy and bullying — I knew he was hiding something. I just didn’t know what.

He wasn’t remotely charming or funny. He was deeply misogynistic: from a terrible joke about his desire to see his female staff only wearing Prada bikinis in his New York house, even in winter, to telling me he enjoyed being surrounded by women because he liked ‘elegant things’.

Mostly, though, he was a thug, who soon told me he had compiled a dossier on my then-husband and me. He claimed that he could get my husband fired from his job, and me from mine.

He continually threatened to sue me personally, which, he reminded me, he knew I couldn’t afford. Strangest of all, he threatened to put a ‘hex’ — a demonic spell — on my unborn children.

This crossed all normal boundaries — and it became an obsession for him. He wanted to know who my doctor was, where the babies would be delivered. And he warned me: ‘I know all the doctors in this town.’

Because of the threats, I recorded him, on the advice of my lawyer. The transcripts of these conversations run to some 450 pages.

Now you will be able to hear parts of these, re-enacted by actors (sadly, I lost the micro-cassettes years ago) in my podcast Chasing Ghislaine, released on Audible next week. This is executive-produced with bestselling writer James Patterson, and we have also filmed a documentary series to be released by Discovery Plus later this year.

Now, of course, Epstein is dead: he was found hanged in his New York federal jail cell in 2019 in circumstances that continue to trouble conspiracy theorists.

Ghislaine, his alleged accomplice, is awaiting trial for sex trafficking and other offences, and faces up to 80 years behind bars if found guilty. She denies all the charges.

And in light of the appalling alleged crimes, particularly those committed against children, that this pair have been accused of — and, in some cases, of which Epstein was found guilty — my conversations with the man are all the more chilling.

What you hear in them is a master manipulator at work: someone with many secrets to hide.

In 2002, for example, Epstein told me rich people don’t go to the authorities when their money is stolen: they just want it back. Now I know what he meant.

I have discovered while preparing the podcast that, for 30 years, Epstein was embroiled in a shady underworld involving international espionage, blackmail, money-laundering and smuggling guns, diamonds and drugs.

He boasted that he was a ‘hyper-fixer’: someone who could move between different countries and cultures, exchanging information, but mostly making money through shadowy deals.

But, perhaps inevitably, what most fixated him during his talks with me were ‘the girls’.

Again and again, he asked me: ‘What about the girls? What have you got on the girls?’ The answer, I know today, was ‘not enough’.

One woman who’d been to dinner at Epstein’s house described the event to me as being like Eyes Wide Shut, the 1999 film starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and featuring a debauched mass orgy.

There were parties, I heard, where Epstein and Maxwell cavorted with rich older men — among foreign women who looked much younger.

Now I know that, at the same time Epstein was demanding of me ‘what about the girls?’ he was raping 15-year-old Jennifer Araoz, a beautiful child from the poorer New York borough of Queens.

Jennifer’s harrowing testimony and its devastating impact on her life are revealed in our podcast: she now runs a foundation, Survivors Initiative, to help girls like her.

For my Vanity Fair article, I did find two sisters, Annie and Marie Farmer. Separately, each told me that Epstein had sexually abused both of them, Annie when she was just 15. I believed them and I wanted to publish their story, but to my dismay, the sisters’ allegations did not make into my Vanity Fair article.

The magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, says that he and the publication’s lawyers didn’t believe my reporting was sufficient, even though I maintain we had three sources supporting their allegations. (Carter has denied this.)

Troublingly, however, I have an email from December 2002 — just before the story was due to be published — from a colleague at Vanity Fair that reads: ‘Bless you — guess who just appeared in Graydon’s office? Jeffrey Epstein.’

It is, to say the least, highly unusual for the subject of an investigative magazine article to appear in the offices of the outlet profiling them — and perhaps especially in the editor’s office.

Did the impeccably well-connected Epstein put pressure on the magazine to drop any hint of the sexual abuse I had uncovered about him? I don’t know.

But there is no doubt Epstein was rattled by my forthcoming article. In one of our last and most unpleasant exchanges, he snarled that we had reached the point where this was no longer about a journalist and the subject of a magazine profile, it was about me and him: it was, he said, ‘personal’.

His threats to my unborn children had affected me, and when I subsequently gave birth to twin boys, they were two months premature. I believe the stress of dealing with Epstein led to the premature births, and as they remained in the neonatal intensive care unit for weeks, then months, it was hard to forget his ugly threat to have a witchdoctor cast a spell on them.

As for Ghislaine?

Writing my magazine article, I was told by reliable sources that she was hopelessly in Epstein’s thrall.

Stuart Pivar, a New York society art dealer and a former friend of Epstein’s, told me that Epstein appointed him to watch over Ghislaine in the days after Robert Maxwell mysteriously fell to his death from his yacht in 1991.

Pivar said Epstein told him to make sure Ghislaine ‘made it through this dark period’. But it was difficult to match the glittering social queen Ghislaine seemed at Manhattan parties with the woman described by the Farmer sisters, ‘pathetic’ in her emotional and financial dependency on Epstein, who treated her with disdain.

Annie told me Ghislaine had given her a topless massage when she was 16 — below the age of consent in America. Maria claimed Ghislaine had pretended to be asleep and held her hand while Jeffrey groped her one night in Ohio.

I had to put these allegations to Ghislaine in a deeply unpleasant phone call. She denied everything. She was furious.

And after the article ran — without, luckily for Maxwell and Epstein, the Farmers’ allegations — I hoped never I’d never see the pair of them again.

But Ghislaine and I were to cross paths again a few more times.

We ran into each other a few years later in New York. This time, she had a new boyfriend, Ted Waitt. He had founded a computer hardware company and made a fortune. They’d met through Bill Clinton and now she boasted about flying helicopters and piloting a submarine that was attached to Ted’s yacht, as well as the philanthropic work she was doing, saving the oceans.

She didn’t mention Jeffrey Epstein — and why would she? In 2009, he had been jailed for 18 months for solicitation of a prostitute and a minor in Palm Beach, Florida. Much of New York society had decided that he was a creep — though they didn’t know that a U.S. Attorney, no less, had shut down a far more serious federal investigation into his crimes.

That might have been the end of the story. But in 2011, a photograph, taken in Ghislaine’s London townhouse, emerged. It showed a young girl, Virginia Roberts, standing with Prince Andrew with his arm pulled around her waist as Ghislaine smiled beside them.

Roberts claimed that when she was 17 Epstein and Maxwell had ‘pimped her out’ to Prince Andrew. In subsequent years Ghislaine has denied this.

In 2011, the year that photograph emerged, Maxwell and Waitt separated. I last glimpsed Ghislaine in 2014 at a book party, but I don’t recall talking to her. That was one of the last events many of her friends remember seeing her at in New York.

In 2015, after leaving Vanity Fair, I finally wrote a piece about the Farmers with the sisters’ help, published in the Daily Beast. This laid out their claims of what had been done to them in the 1990s.

I’ve no idea what Ghislaine thought of that article. But the following year, 2016, I received a call — the number was withheld — and answered.

It was Ghislaine. She asked if I knew that I was on the witness list for Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who was then suing her for defamation.

A spokesperson for Ghislaine had called Virginia a liar.

I was surprised by the call. I hadn’t met Virginia, though I would later interview her.

But I couldn’t get off the phone quick enough. Journalists don’t want to be dragged into people’s private legal actions. Our job is to report and to protect our sources.

Ghislaine left New York in 2016, I discovered. But in 2019 she emailed me out of the blue, asking to meet for coffee.

This was in the wake of allegations that Epstein had received an unduly lenient sentence in Florida — allegedly perverting justice for dozens of his victims.

I sensed that she wanted to see me for litigation purposes, so I did not reply to her note.

Since her incarceration a year ago, she has become perhaps the most hated woman in the world. People find the idea of a woman allegedly abusing other women — children, even — worse than if a man does it.

And Ghislaine isn’t just any woman. She’s educated, born into immense privilege, with an extraordinary contacts book.

But there are still many questions about her. Even those who thought they knew her well are in the dark about the true nature of her relationship with Epstein — and what they may or may not have done together.

Still others — particularly certain very rich, very powerful men — fear that, even from the grave, Epstein could yet bring them down.

Chasing Ghislaine is an Audible Original podcast released on July 15. audible.com/ghislaine

How one school leader is winning the trust of parents

Like many parents, I suspect, I’ve been anxiously awaiting news from my twin sons’ schools about plans for the fall in these most uncertain of times.

Last week, one of them, The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, invited all parents to a webinar where they laid out their plans for a reopening and took questions in real time.

The session, which lasted an hour, was one of the most uplifting experiences I’ve had since the pandemic began.

The headmaster, Steven Murray, and his fellow faculty members inspired hope — not just because they are opening the private boarding school — and certainly not because they promised a Covid-free environment for the students. In fact Murray was clear that the school was unlikely to be Covid-free and that the community’s mind-set would have to change: “zero risk tolerance is not realistic; coming to school will not be 100% risk free any more than driving a car is risk free,” he said.

What was truly inspiring was the immense effort, thought, integrity — and above all humility– that went into his presentation. Of course, the school has resources that many public schools and other private schools may not have, but Murray has certainly put them to good use in this crisis.

He and the faculty task force have been on a steep learning curve and already made extraordinary infrastructure innovations and program alterations that include: pre-arrival protocols, testing, tracking technology, tracing, mask-wearing, social-distancing, isolation, an expanded health center, PPE, hepa filters, new air filters, touchless toilets, sinks and showers, plexiglass shields, individual cleaning bags for students, longer lunches to avoid crowding, quarantine facilities, smaller classrooms and staggered arrivals.

But Murray did not promise perfection. Rather, he showed vulnerability, promising to loop parents in on his deep-dive discovery about how best to keep the kids as safe as possible in “the new normal.”

“I never knew I’d be studying viral load in a breath or a cough versus viral load left on a doorknob … or using terms like de-densifying social spaces … but here we are,” he began.

And, for me, the most striking part, perhaps was when he likened the many impressive safeguards being put in place to … cheese.

“Most of the protocols are imperfect, but taken together, it’s a little bit like Swiss cheese, each slice has holes, but layered together the holes begin to be covered and so together a series of overlapping protocols can make us safer.”

Swiss cheese has never seemed so comforting.

And how ironic that Murray should use that imagery just three days before the President used another dairy product, in a horrific simile when describing how the National Guard cleared protesters in Minneapolis “like a knife cutting butter.”

Listening to Murray, I felt hopeful for the first time in days (as did my son when I gave him the highlights).

Yes, it’s possible that my son and other students will get sick he goes back to school — but I take great comfort, as does he, in the fact that he is in the best possible hands, a faculty who are learning and reaching out, unafraid to say what they don’t know to both students and parents, as they go. Also comforting was a study published Tuesday that people under 20 are about half as likely to get infected by the virus than their elders.

Murray’s presentation was a welcome reminder of what real leadership can and should look like in these uncertain times, when there is a vacuum at the top of our country.

Our President continually talks about himself and his management of the pandemic in hyperbolically optimistic — one might easily argue mendacious — language. He has claimed success in confronting the virus, giving credit to just one person: himself.

Whereas Murray was careful to lay great emphasis on how success for the school could only come from a shared responsibility in the community.

“My actions affect others,” Murray said and he talked of new behaviors to be learned, and internalized and how the example comes from the top.

As he said this, the contrasting image of the President’s unmasked face, came to mind, along with imaginings of what the unmasked rallies slated to begin this weekend will look like and what sickness they will spread.

In considering how to open safely, Murray said he has consulted with the CDC, state officials, local hospitals, pediatricians, New England high schools and universities, business leaders including the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and the PGA, the owner of an NBA franchise, Pennsylvania University Medical school, state and federal officials and hired an consulting firm that specializes in epidemiology and environmental hazards in hospitals.

At Lawrenceville, unlike the Trump White House, they are NOT taking the view that they know better than the scientists and other experts.

Murray is not running for re-election in November, but in some ways the stakes for him are just as high as they are for the President.

If his school doesn’t open, come September, the outcome could be disastrous, given that his business model is heavily dependent on tuition fees.

So, since he cannot promise a Covid-free environment, he is offering something that is, I’d argue, just as valuable, maybe more: trust.

His webinar showed that even in the midst of the crisis — or crises in which our country is immersed — trust is winnable.

From where I sit, Swiss cheese is a great deal more reassuring than sliced butter.

Trump brings back 2016 veterans as his campaign makes aggressive turn

As President Donald Trump struggles with sagging poll numbers and faces a chaotic news cycle, his reelection campaign is going back to the well of players who shaped his successful 2016 bid.

In the last week, Trump’s campaign has hired two veterans from his first White House run, Jason Miller and Boris Epshteyn, to senior advisory roles — moves that people familiar with the decisions say are part of an effort driven by the President himself for his team to push back more combatively at Democrats and their presumptive nominee, Joe Biden. According to two people with knowledge of their conversation, Trump encouraged Miller to “maximize the killers” who could reinvigorate the campaign.

“We are going to get much more aggressive,” said one senior campaign official.

Miller and Epshteyn are just two examples of how the President is increasingly relying on the group of people who helped him win the White House four years ago. Hope Hicks, one of the original Trump campaign aides, came back to the White House in March after leaving the West Wing in 2018. The President’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, still meets with and talks to Trump on a regular basis while serving as an unpaid senior adviser to the campaign. And David Bossie, who runs an unaffiliated PAC and is close with Lewandowski, is also regularly called upon for counsel. Last week, Trump also appointed Lewandowski and Bossie to the Commission on Presidential Scholars, which advises the Department of Education program.

The campaign insists the moves are not a shakeup. Campaign manager Brad Parscale, who ran the campaign’s digital operation in 2016 but now runs all of the day-to-day operations, remains in charge. A senior campaign official said these new hires are in part designed to support Parscale as he manages the home stretch of the campaign.

But the hires also reflect how Trump often seeks familiarity and affirmation when facing difficulties — and the last three months have produced a steady stream of challenges for the President. A June CNN poll of registered voters nationally finds Trump trailing Biden by 14 points, the worst in a series of recent polls that have the former vice president ahead, sometimes with a majority of support. There have been nearly 2 million cases and over 111,000 deaths in the US from coronavirus, while protesters continue to march in streets across the country in response to George Floyd’s death.

“When a campaign starts to struggle, it’s normal for a candidate to look for an outside set of eyes to come in and provide a fresh perspective or provide a new direction to the campaign,” said Kevin Madden, a former presidential campaign adviser to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. “That’s what the President is doing here. He wants his old crew of true loyalists who were there for his 2016 win.”

The slate of returning advisers suggests Trump intends to double down on the approach that won him both the Republican nomination and the presidency in 2016: bruising your opponent while defending yourself as aggressively as possible.

Both of his most recent hires join the campaign from positions as unofficial surrogates on alternative outlets to the mainstream media. Miller, a veteran Republican consultant who was senior communications adviser for Trump’s campaign in 2016, had for months co-hosted the War Room podcast with former White House and Trump campaign official Steve Bannon to defend the President during the impeachment inquiry. And following a short stint in the White House in 2017, Epshteyn delivered on-camera pro-Trump commentary on the Sinclair Broadcasting network of local television news stations.

The President has been looking not just to get the 2016 band back together but to start a comeback tour. In recent weeks, aides have told CNN, the President has been anxious about quickly resuming his in-person campaign rallies, which have been non-existent since the brunt of the pandemic began. The Trump team has been laying the groundwork to relaunch rallies in July but had sped up the timeline in part because of the overwhelming protests in support of Floyd and police reforms.

The rallies will not just give the President the chance to direct the news cycle back to himself but to fully train his rhetorical fire on Biden, who had not yet clinched the Democratic nomination when social distancing became the nationwide norm. While Trump and his team are anxious to unload on Biden, officials say they recognize that the overwhelming barrage of news has made the race much more about the President than his opponent. Still, they believe that there is plenty of time for the narrative to change.

“It’s all about Trump,” the senior official said. “The general populace has forgotten Joe Biden even exists.”

Trump’s campaign argues that once protests subside and as the country re-opens, Biden’s role in the race will become much more important and they will be able to draw a clearer contrast.

“It will be quite a contrast between the two,” said Tim Murtaugh, campaign communications director, “When we start our rallies and you see the crowds it will be clear that there is a stark enthusiasm gap between Biden and the President.”

CNN’s Dana Bash contributed to this report.

Trump’s allies grow frustrated with White House response amid national upheaval

As President Donald Trump remains out of public view and as his aides deliberate how and whether he should address some of the worst racial unrest in decades some of his allies are growing increasingly frustrated with what has felt like silence from the White House.

Many of the President’s traditional defenders — from campaign donors to Republicans on Capitol Hill to some in the conservative media — have privately grumbled that Trump has allowed several days to pass without addressing the nation or making any formal appeals for unity.

What Trump has done publicly — tweet extensively about his grievances with Democratic state and local leaders and mention the protests in the middle of a previously scheduled event — has at best gone unnoticed and at worst fanned the flames of outrage into a second week.

Some outside allies have reached out to the White House in recent days to push for an appearance from the President in which he would confront a crisis he has largely watched unfold from behind closed doors or in his underground bunker.

One major campaign donor worried that the damage inflicted by Trump’s absence during a historic weekend of violence and pain could alone imperil his reelection.

One person familiar with the matter said there is a sense among allies that an attempt to address the situation in a speech over the weekend fell completely flat. The person said the unrelated backdrop of the Kennedy Space Center — and the fact that the speech came on a Saturday afternoon — ensured few people even registered the passages that were added at the last minute.

“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd,” Trump said in his remarks after watching the first manned US space launch in nearly a decade. “The mobs are devastating the life’s work of good people and destroying their dreams.”

Trump’s measured tone stood in stark contrast to his barrage of tweets over the weekend, which included messages blaming Antifa for the unrest and vowing severe retaliation.

A growing number of congressional Republicans, even Trump’s allies, have privately said the “caps lock” tweets are not helping the situation. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said on “Fox News Sunday” that he had spoken to Trump over the weekend about his inflammatory tweets, which he described as “not constructive.”

Over the weekend, some aides sought to convince Trump not to use violent rhetoric after he wrote on Twitter that “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” warning language like that could inflame an already combustible situation and would not appear presidential.

Inside the White House, advisers remain divided over whether a speech delivered from the Oval Office or elsewhere at the White House would help lower the national temperature.

Trump has expressed interest in delivering a speech to the nation, a person close to the White House said, but some administration officials believe that would be a mistake. A senior White House aide said governors and mayors should be the ones responding to the destruction in their respective cities and states — a view at least partially shared by Trump, who has spent days going after local leaders for not calling the National Guard fast enough or cracking down on violence aggressively enough.

In a heated phone call with governors on Monday morning, Trump placed responsibility on the governors for resolving the national crisis and said some of them appeared “weak” in their responses so far.

Other White House officials argued over the weekend against something as formal as an Oval Office address, a person familiar said, out of concern that such a speech could “inflame the situation, not make it better.”

As aides debate how and whether to confront the situation, Trump’s back-and-forth between violent rhetoric and a more measured tone has weighed in the deliberations, one official said. Some advisers wonder whether a presidential address calling for calm would be quickly erased by Trump’s own penchant for escalation and instigation.

It did not seem such a speech was imminent on Monday morning.

“A national Oval Office address is not going to stop Antifa,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in an appearance Monday on Fox News, noting that Trump had addressed the killing of George Floyd — a black Minneapolis man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest — several times already.

“The President has addressed this repeatedly,” she said. Later, McEnany said Trump’s “focus right now is acting and keeping our streets safe.”

The naive–and reckless–rule breakers of Covid-19

Last week, a Washington, DC-based media executive who is used to attending 200 cocktail parties a year decided that he could take talking to his microwave no more.

In contravention of the city’s shelter-in-place executive order, he secretly attended two different dinner parties in Georgetown, an affluent DC-neighborhood.

When he first told me this, I assumed I had either misheard or misunderstood. “Virtual dinners right?” I asked. “No” was the reply. These were the old-fashioned, in-person sort.

Each time, he explained, the host’s instructions were the same. For both dinners, he entered through the back gate of the property, so disapproving neighbors would not see him. He was told in advance that neither he, nor any other guests, could take any photographs or talk about the party.

The first dinner was hosted by a movie producer. A group of four listened to music and sat under heated lamps six feet apart in the garden where they were served dinner. According to the executive, none had been in contact with anyone who had suffered Covid-19 — as far as they knew. All had been isolating.

The two dinners in Washington are not the only anecdotes I’ve heard of illicit gatherings that break the country’s shelter-in-place restrictions and feature varying degrees of social distance.

I’ve been told by a source about an underground hair salon in Palm Beach, Florida, that never ceased operations, despite the state’s restrictions, and which her elderly mother has insisted on patronizing.

I’ve also heard about the trio of real estate executives who get drunk together, rotating homes every night in a leafy suburb of Westchester.

And the AA group in Virginia Beach whose members sit in a circle in someone’s garden, because, they say, virtual meetings are not sufficient to prevent some from falling off the wagon.

There are the Brooklyn friends who’ve had Sunday dinner together since the pandemic began. And there is the news report this week about the cannabis users who, police said, quite brazenly gathered in Manhattan for a 4/20 Day celebration. And so on.

I even know elderly people in my native country, the United Kingdom, who’ve gone over to each other’s gardens to sit six feet apart for a glass of wine. “I’d rather die than live without seeing people,” one of them offered as justification.

Most of the people I talked to are middle class or affluent. It takes money to have a dining table in your backyard in Washington. And a lot of money to have a live-in chef.

It would appear that just as the rich are more easily able to outrun Covid-19 than the working classes, they may also be more able and willing to break the shelter in place rules.

But according to Robert Leahy, the Manhattan-based director of the American Institute of Cognitive Therapy and author of the book, “The Worry Cure,” they may be gathering under a false sense of security in the belief that Covid-19 won’t touch them. “It takes one sneeze or one case to create a cluster,” says Leahy, pointing at Fairfield County, Connecticut, which currently has 8,472 confirmed Covid cases, as an example of a wealthy enclave that’s turned into a hot spot.

An arresting new CDC graphic — highlighted by CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta — about transmission of the coronavirus among people seated at adjacent tables in a restaurant shows that the virus may be passed on in droplets much more easily than hitherto known.

Regardless, the breach of physical distancing rules is a behavioral trend that psychologists fear we are likely to see increasingly in the next few weeks, as state by state, the nation waits for an uneven legal reopening.

“I believe there will be increasing non-compliance that is simply due to human nature,” says Leahy.

“Even when there’s not a pandemic we, as a species, tend to make decisions that negatively affect our public health based on our immediate need, whether it’s smoking, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, overeating, overspending… we are wired to look for immediate gratification. Remember, we were once scavengers. That’s why this is very hard,” says Leahy. “The difficulty that people have is in the uncertainty about how long they have to wait to get back to doing what they used to do.”

But Leahy says the ultimate question for people to think about before they gather like the groups in Washington and elsewhere, is this: “What is more dangerous? Feeling anxious or risky behavior?”

Even for the AA group, the answer, Leahy says, is always risky behavior. “What I am saying to those people who gathered for whatever reason is: ‘Which, ultimately would you regret more? That you didn’t go to the AA meeting or the hair salon or the dinner? Or that you got Covid-19 or infected someone else with Covid-19 and that person died?'”

Meanwhile, he says to take solace in the government’s phasing plans to reopen, and to remember this situation is not forever.

“Focus on what you CAN do and not what you can’t. Many people can connect with friends, family, meetings.”

“Remember, socially distanced does not have to mean socially disconnected.”

In other words, you don’t have to talk only to the microwave.

How the very rich are different in the Covid-19 fight

I have spent two decades reporting on people at the nexus of money, power and culture. I’ve written books about corruption among the country’s wealthiest 1%, Wall Street greed and the ruthlessness of New York real estate titans. So these past few weeks I have been on the phone to many people who are not stuck, like me, in a New York City apartment, where we are on constant alert for the ominous sound of sirens puncturing the silence with increasing frequency.

Instead, many of those I spoke to are in places where they feel relatively safe. Many don’t realize they may be in a bubble of false security as the number of coronavirus infections spreads out into suburban and rural Long Island — including Suffolk County, home of the Hamptons — and other areas where the country’s extremely wealthy have second homes.

One hedge fund billionaire is at his ranch in Texas; another is isolating from other family members on a compound in Martha’s Vineyard; a couple is in a villa on Harbour Island, Bahamas; an individual rented a yacht on the Long Island Sound … and so on.

It would be unfair to say that these people are living without fear. If they needed any proof that Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate by pocketbook, they need look no further than some of the high-profile confirmed cases like Knicks owner James Dolan, actor Tom Hanks and Prince Charles.

“We are just trying to do our best for ourselves and our families. You can’t blame us for that,” one multimillionaire with three country homes told me.

All I spoke to did so on condition of anonymity; all felt they were better placed to outrun Covid-19 if they were not stuck in high-density areas like New York City. (I should add that those who spoke to me are not necessarily representative of the entire socio-economic group. Major Wall Street financiers have been spotted in Central Park and certainly billionaires like Bill Gates have donated significant funding to coronavirus research.)

But while the wealthy may not be immune, their affluence makes it easier for them to insulate themselves. Unlike essential workers, housekeepers or nannies who cannot survive without their weekly paychecks, publications like The New York Times have data showing how those of means were able adopt protective isolation measures earlier than lower-income workers.

The top 1% of US earners can do that even better than the rest of us. Some of those in the Hamptons seem even to be enjoying themselves. Some are playing golf while others are gardening and comparing notes about hygiene. One person I know has her family’s food driven out from New York City every day. It’s not the same experience as walking past the hospital tents in Central Park or the boarded-up stores. And it can be harshly antithetical to the experience of an essential worker who must take public transport to get to a hospital or grocery store for a day’s work.

For some of the rich I speak to, a more urgent headache than the symptom of the virus is the possible ramifications of the economic shutdown — but even that may be much less meaningful than you’d think given the tax break some are getting from the stimulus package. A clause in the bill allows commercial real estate developers to offset paper losses from the depreciation of their buildings against taxes on profits from other investments like the stock market. A New York Times report says the estimated cost of the change over 10 years is $170 billion.

One real estate mogul told me that he cracked open the champagne beside the pool the day the CARES Act was passed by Congress.

“Some people are going to get very rich out of this,” says someone else I know in the health care supplies business.

Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr. Ashwin Vasantold me that he’s heard disturbing stories of wealthy individuals procuring their own ventilators. This at a time governors of hard-hit states say they’re about to run out of their own essential supplies.

Two people I spoke to told me that they have obtained prophylactically, their own stash of the malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, currently undergoing clinical trials as a possible therapy but not yet proven safe and effective for this use. Vasan says that whichever doctor supplied the drug behaved not only dangerously, but irresponsibly.

“Every hospital in the city is doing clinical trials of that medicine under controlled conditions so to say: I’m going to give it to someone in their home without the ability to truly monitor them … I don’t consider them to be remotely responsible,” Vasan said.

Vasan says that this is a time for health care professionals to pull together. “This is not a time for concierge medicine,” he says. And yet several in the Hamptons told me they felt safe precisely because there are private doctors who have homes there and whose private staff will pay house calls, assuming you have paid their multi-thousand-dollar subscription fee.

The self-protectionist mindset of the wealthy is not new, according to the historian Dr. Amanda Foreman. “During the Second World War, despite the rationing across the United Kingdom, those who could afford it, could have dinner in the Ritz hotel,” she says.

But the irony of an elitist approach during these times is that it may well backfire, according to Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist and former Harvard medical professor who recently chaired the ninth US-China health summit in the pandemic epicenter of Wuhan.

According to Haseltine, the people who have left the city have put themselves at greater risk than if they had stayed put and practiced careful isolation and hygiene, because they have put themselves further away from the best hospitals. His opinion was echoed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his April 3 press conference, where he talked about the spike in Nassau and Suffolk counties. “Long Island does not have as elaborate a health care system as New York City … and that has us very concerned,” he said.

Haseltine says it’s “a fundamental mistake” to think you are safer in a wide-open space.

“It’s comfortable to be in a country house … People feel they have more control,” he says. “You have more space, you think that you’re not one of many, you’re more special. But it’s all psychological.”

The risk of Covid-19, he says, is equated to how many people you meet who might be infected. It’s not like the bubonic plague of London that was spread by fleas and rats. With Covid-19 there is no reason to think that people in the countryside are any less infected than the people in New York City.

Somewhere in all this, there is a very grim morality story.

Foreman says that the social division of Covid-19 could be summarized as “The Makers and the Takers.” If you’re a Maker, you’re someone who has found a way to contribute to the community in various ways, from the student who set up a volunteer network to shop for the elderly to first responders and workers like caregivers who take daily personal risks to save others. If you’re a Taker, you’re fixated only on yourself, your survival — and what the pandemic will mean for your bottom line.

Romeo and Juliet in the age of Covid-19

I am a working single mother of twin 17-year-old boys.

One is a high-achieving junior, the sort who runs, sings and does well academically. His brother, two minutes younger, is a sophomore who is a self-proclaimed nerd. He prefers to live on his computer in isolation, even when it’s not actually mandatory.

In ordinary times, both are kind, gentle, smart kids, with whom I have a strong bond. A psychological educational evaluation found that the older twin has extraordinarily high self-sacrificing tendencies.

But that was before Covid-19.

In the past week, as each day New York State’s restrictions on socializing have gotten tighter, my boys have become more shrill, more urgent and insistent about my “overreaction” to the social distancing guidelines.

Bear in mind, the elder just had his SAT exam and college tours canceled. Like high schoolers everywhere, both have had their spring semester canceled. Online classes have not started yet. They are supposed to be in Florida on spring break. And they are restless.

In a bitter irony of timing, the elder had just gotten himself a girlfriend. No matter how often I warned that he and his new girlfriend not meet, he slipped out — and did just that. I repeatedly told him it’s not my family that’s so much at risk (my elderly mom and dad and family reside in the UK) but his girlfriend’s relatives might be endangered if he is a virus carrier. He told me they kept six feet apart — but I wonder how likely that is.

A few days ago, he went for a run in Central Park — a run that went on for four hours. I asked what had kept him and he said he’d joined in a volleyball game — exactly the sort New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said to avoid not 12 hours later.

He looked at me as if I was slightly dim when I squawked my disapproval.

My other son, the younger twin, atypically, decided this was the ideal week to break his habitual isolation. He turned his bedroom into a shelter for a not-very-good friend who was roaming New York City with a backpack and vast duffel bag in an act of rebellion against his divorcing parents. I was on a CNN conference call when this young man entered my home office and inquired if he could “explain” what was going on in his personal life, a prelude, I presumed, to asking if he could stay indefinitely.

Politely — actually, not that politely — I sent him home to his allegedly warring parents.

I’d just watched Gov. Cuomo say on TV that the new state guidelines forbade unnecessary people in our homes.

Thursday night, I pricked up my ears when psychologist Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer said on CNN’s Town Hall that the group she was most concerned about under the new social distancing guidelines were teenagers.

“Teenagers are supposed to be leaving their homes and engaging with their peers and they’re supposed to be trying new things,” she told Anderson Cooper. “And they’re to get less of that right now. And so they need to find ways to feel their impact and to stay connected to the groups that are important to them.”

I phoned Dr. Schmelzer to get deeper insight into why she’d focused on teens. What she said was reassuring to me — and, also, I suspect to other parents in a similar predicament. First, she said, teens in general just don’t have the “capacity” or “maturity” to see outside their own selves right now.

“Teenagers are a group of people for whom risk has always been an issue,” she said. “They weigh risk and this (Covid-19) doesn’t seem that big. Historically we’ve capitalized on that by sending them to war, so the problem is they are now weighing in the mind the relative risk and it doesn’t seem that big to them…Because in that kind of self-sovereign adult development state of life, it’s about me…it’s all about what I want.”

Second, she said, teenage boys would be the single worst demographic to cope with Covid-19. Yes, worse than teenage girls. “They live in their bodies,” she said. “If it doesn’t feel dangerous — (if) there’s no physical sensation like standing on the edge of a bridge or doing something physically dangerous, they can’t feel it…the idea that a grandmother might die is too abstract for them.”

What then is a mother of teen boys to do?

“Stay in the fight,” Schmelzer said. “Explain that this is for the health and safety (of the) country. That this a war like World War II was. Tell them stories about your grandparents’ sacrifices in war time. Don’t expect to get through in one conversation. Keep at it. Keep storytelling.”

She suggested that discussions in military families might be different to those in families with no direct personal experience of war. “That’s a segregation we haven’t discussed,” she pointed out.

And what should we do about our exes? Given the high US divorce rate, I’m not the only parent faced with the issue of how to best co-parent in a time that requires physical separation of households.

“Go for a walk with your ex-husband, six feet apart, and come up with a co-parenting program for the next four months” Schmelzer said. “I don’t think cutting kids off from parents or giving people the ability to say ‘Oh good I can cut my ex out now’ is a good idea.”

I showed this article to my sons. Both acknowledged that Schmelzer had tapped into exactly how they were feeling. “People keep talking about an invisible enemy and it’s really hard to understand that,” said my younger son. “If you shipped me off to war, I’d feel useful. Now with the quarantine, I just feel helpless.”

And the older? His girlfriend has now left New York City for the countryside. “I feel stuck and lonely,” he said. But then he grinned, a heartening sign that he is growing into some perspective — and maturity.

“You can write that I feel like Romeo, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,'” he said. Then he laughed.

2017 ‘hit lists’ show that team Trump has long eyed political opponents

Just months into his presidency, a small circle of senior White House advisers met with Donald Trump about a carefully curated list containing the names of dozens of perceived political opponents, particularly leakers, working inside the government.

A detailed account of the meeting was revealed for the first time to CNN by two former senior administration officials, who said that the April 2017 gathering included then senior strategist Steve Bannon and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

After being shown the list, the President told McMaster to deal with it, according to one of the officials.

McMaster and Bannon walked away from the meeting with different interpretations of Trump’s instructions, according to the two former officials and two other former senior officials in the President’s orbit who were briefed on the conversation.

Three of the officials told CNN that Bannon understood Trump wanted people fired, while the fourth said that McMaster believed the President’s direction was to deal with leaks in a systematic fashion, rather than a mass firing.

The political plotting in the early days of Trump’s presidency provides a window into a three-year effort by Trump and his loyalists to identify and expunge suspected “deep state” opponents from the White House and in some cases other parts of the government, a move that was kept at bay until recent weeks.

Removing government officials seen as disloyal to the President has unfolded in earnest since Trump was impeached but not removed from office and there are no signs the purges will let up.

The President expressed in public remarks last Saturday that he’s getting rid of bad people in government who are “not people that love our country.”

In recent weeks, Trump has expressed to aides that he wants fewer people working for him at the White House and only those identified as loyalists to hold key positions in his administration, leading to a fresh batch of lists from allies, the existence of which was first reported by Axios.

The existence of “deep state” lists in the early days of Trump’s presidency was widely talked about in the halls of the National Security Council and the State Department, according to multiple former White House officials, although several officials named on the list tell CNN they didn’t know that any such list really existed or that they were on it. The “deep state” refers to a right-wing belief that certain members of the federal bureaucracy are actively undermining the Trump presidency.

One contributor to the list that was collated and frequently updated in early 2017 was former NSC official and former Trump campaign aide Rich Higgins. He told CNN in an exclusive interview recently that from the beginning of his tenure he was convinced that leaks of minutes of highly classified meetings were from holdovers of the Obama administration and he suspected widespread resistance to some of the administration efforts.

Higgins is not involved in the current lists and does not have a current connection to the White House. The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Bannon and McMaster declined to comment for this story.

The ‘hit list’ squad

Higgins, 45, a former Pentagon official who consulted for the Trump campaign in the 2016 election as a counterterrorism adviser, joined the NSC in February 2017 as director of strategic planning.

Higgins told CNN he arrived to find two senior NSC directors and fellow Trump appointees, Col. Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, regularly meeting over coffee or gathering in their offices and joined them in a mission to find alleged leakers and those perceived as resistant to the Trump administration’s policies.

Two former senior White House officials told CNN they remembered seeing Harvey and Cohen-Watnick frequently meeting with Bannon in Bannon’s office and the duo made them aware they were collating lists of people they believed were disloyal. One former senior administration official described the group as “the Hardy Boys.”

Multiple senior administration officials told CNN that in early spring of 2017, Bannon gave a list of names of suspected leakers to Trump while McMaster was traveling.

McMaster became aware that Bannon wanted them fired and, irate, phoned then-White House chief counsel Don McGahn that night to complain and ask if what they were doing was legal, according to two sources. McGahn declined to comment for this story.

Higgins says that over the course of several months, the group worked off other similar lists that were circulating and created new versions that contained roughly four dozen people who they felt were politically opposed to Trump, including Obama appointees, those detailed to the White House and “Never Trumpers.” The list shrank or expanded in the following months depending on normal staff rotation, Higgins said.

CNN has obtained three of the lists that Higgins says the group collated and discussed. One is titled “Holdovers” and is dated July 2017. Another is titled “Personnel Policy Decisions,” with a subhead “Trump Administration NSC Appointments Not supporting Potus Vision and Expressed Intent.” It has seven names on it, along with their titles and a category marked “Justification.”

A third list, dated June 2017, has 39 names on it that included Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ current Middle East adviser Robert Malley, who left the administration when Trump took office, the former special envoy on ISIS Brett McGurk, and the person the White House believes to be the Ukraine whistleblower. When asked why Malley was on the list, Higgins told CNN, “We left him on by mistake.”

Malley and McGurk declined to comment for this story. Mark Zaid, the former attorney for the whistleblower, told CNN that he’s unable to comment. Amy Jeffress, the lawyer at Arnold & Porter now representing the whistleblower, would not comment on the matter to CNN after the news organization published the article.

McMaster not having it

Higgins says the group was aware that McMaster would not approve of what they were doing.

In mid-April, Higgins says, he was asked to get the most current list to Bannon. According to Higgins, Bannon told him he showed the list to Trump on April 17, 2017, and the President had demanded McMaster take action.

When nothing happened, Higgins says, he wrote a memo that was reported on by The Atlantic titled “Potus and Political Warfare,” which Higgins says he then printed out, with the idea of having a group discussion among like-minded individuals.

“The memo was my estimate of the situation, explanatory but not certain. I wanted to generate discussion and awareness around me,” he told CNN.

The seven-page memo warned of threats from “globalist corporatists & bankers” and “Islamists,” as well as the “deep state.” It said the “narrative” that “Russia hacked the election” was “illegitimate” and was a deliberate effort to destroy Trump’s agenda.

“Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognized the threat he poses and see his destruction,” it reads.

“I didn’t write it by myself,” Higgins told CNN, adding that there were various people who were on the NSC staff then. “And I didn’t write it in one sitting. It was the product of hours of conversations.”

Higgins says he never learned if the President read his memo. But Higgins says Bannon told him that his efforts were discovered — and not appreciated by McMaster, who stood up at an NSC town hall on July 13 and told staff that “there’s no such thing as a hold-over,” Bloomberg reported.

Higgins says that on July 18, he was summoned to the NSC general counsel’s office and asked if he had written the memo. He said, “Yes.” On July 21, McMaster’s deputy, Ricky Waddell, told Higgins to resign, according to Higgins. Waddell did not respond to several requests for comment.

Two weeks later, around the end of July, CNN reported that both Harvey and Cohen-Watnick left the NSC under circumstances that were not clear. Higgins says the two were told to go. On August 18, Bannon also left the White House.

Harvey declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Cohen-Watnick told CNN: “At no time was Ezra involved in creating any political ‘enemies’ list within the Trump NSC, nor was he ‘fired’ from his position in the White House.”

Higgins went on to become a senior fellow at Unconstrained Analytics, a nonprofit think tank. In response to the impeachment, he recently wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “The White House Fired Me for My Loyalty.”

Of the latest lists that have been drawn up by the President’s allies and of Trump’s vicious reaction to political enemies, Higgins told CNN, “It’s a positive development for the administration. Any president, not just this one, deserves to have people who are supportive of his general policy positions around him.”

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to reflect the whistleblower’s current attorney.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.

Exclusive photos of Giuliani in Spain show Lev Parnas has lots more to share

Stored in devices seized from Lev Parnas by law enforcement, there’s a 34-second cell phone video of Rudy Giuliani relishing a bullfight. There are also photos of Donald Trump’s personal attorney posing with two matadors, a flamenco dancer twirling her skirt and an image of the father of Venezuela’s opposition leader beside a tray of hors d’oeuvres on the lawn of a Spanish castle.

The videos and photographs of Giuliani’s trip to Spain, obtained exclusively by CNN, show the efforts Parnas went through to document and save a trove of information. They have aided a slow-drip campaign by Parnas’ legal team to keep the indicted Giuliani associate in the limelight as he builds a defense for his indictment, and could plague Giuliani—and ultimately the President—well after impeachment has passed.

Last week, Parnas and his attorney Joseph Bondy made a show of traveling to Washington and walking up to the US Senate, with cameras in tow. The two knew full well that Parnas could be turned away from the impeachment trial because he was wearing an ankle bracelet, an electronic device that violates the Senate chamber rules.

The stunt came days after Parnas’ lawyer released an 83-minute recording from an April 2018 Trump International Hotel fundraiser where President Donald Trump discusses firing former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, with Parnas and his estranged business partner Igor Fruman.

Fruman made the recording, and Parnas’ lawyer made it public. Yovanovitch was recalled from her post about a year later.

Parnas and Fruman were indicted for campaign finance violations last year by federal prosecutors in New York. They have pleaded not guilty. Parnas’ role as Giuliani’s alleged proxy in Ukraine and the information he possesses became an intriguing part of the impeachment hearings. Fruman and his legal team are not cooperating with the impeachment inquiry and declined to comment for this story.

Parnas is not done

Parnas still possesses an unseen stash of photographs and recordings, Bondy says. Those exist in addition to the notes, text messages and other evidence that is currently in the hands of Congress. The materials were seized by federal investigators in New York from Parnas’ phones and computers when he was indicted in October and shared with Congress by Parnas’ legal team after the judge in his case allowed them to do so in December.

“Over the past several months, it has been revealed that Lev Parnas is a prolific collector of photos and videos,” Bondy told CNN in an interview. “Contrary to what one might expect, Mr. Parnas has not destroyed any. Rather, he has preserved them. The universe of subject matter is yet to be publicly revealed but is of interest in matters well beyond the impeachment inquiry.”

The images obtained by CNN are of trips that provide a peek into relationships Giuliani has not been willing to discuss, specifically work he’s done for legally embattled foreign clients whose interests could intersect with his most prominent client — the President of the United States. Parnas says that the photos help show ties that Giuliani had with business and political interests in Venezuela.

Asked about the trip, Giuliani told CNN that he could not discuss details because it is a matter of “national security.” Giuliani is currently under federal investigation, but has not been charged with any crimes.

Parnas told CNN based on what he heard and saw while traveling last August, Giuliani was seeking to argue that Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, a wealthy Venezuelan client, should be treated leniently by the Department of Justice because of ties with an opposition figure of great importance to US foreign policy. This was first reported by Reuters.

The possible conflict of interests is a recurring theme with Giuliani. The effort bears striking similarity to how Parnas has described an effort to solve legal problems in the US faced by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash

According to Parnas, (and Firtash in a November interview with the New York Times) Giuliani directed Parnas to tell Firtash that Joseph di Genova and Victoria Toensing would represent him and could get his case in front of Attorney General William Barr, if Firtash could hand over information on Joe Biden that would be helpful for the 2020 election. CNN reported last month that Di Genova and Toensing, friends of Giuliani’s, did get a face-to-face meeting with Barr to discuss Firstash, who is facing extradition on bribery charges.

Firtash told the Times he has no information on Biden or his son and did not finance any effort to unearth dirt on them. “Without my will and desire, I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight,” he told the Times. Giuliani has said he “never met” Firtash, but has given conflicting answers on seeking information from him.

Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas at a New York Yankees game in London in June 2019

Betancourt courts Giuliani

Parnas, Giuliani and Fruman met Betancourt, 40, in June at a Yankees game in London, according to both Parnas and another source with knowledge of their meeting. Two of the photos obtained by CNN show Giuliani and Parnas at the game. In one, Giuliani is seen using electronic equipment that Parnas says is for taping his podcast. In the other, they are in the Yankees’ dugout. News of Giuliani and Parnas at the game was first reported by CNN’s KFile.

In London, Parnas says Betancourt asked Giuliani to join his legal team, which already consisted of two long-time Giuliani friends: former US attorney Frank Wohl and the Miami-based former Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale. “Frank and Jon are great lawyers. The only reason Rudy was needed as well was to exert leverage with Barr,” Parnas told CNN. A separate source familiar with Betancourt’s legal strategy told CNN that Giuliani’s connections at the Justice Department, including familiarity with Barr, were considered helpful by Betancourt. Giuliani did not comment on Parnas’ assertion.

Parnas told CNN that hiring lawyers close to Barr was an idea being deployed at the same time by Firtash, who shared that thinking with him. “For both Firtash and for Betancourt, the only point of hiring these lawyers was to get to Barr,” Parnas said.

At the Yankees game and in discussions in London afterwards, Parnas says Betancourt invited Giuliani, himself and others to Spain.

A castle near Madrid

Most of the newly-released images and a video shared with CNN document a week-long trip Parnas took with Giuliani last summer to a castle outside Madrid to meet Betancourt.

According to Parnas, who spoke to CNN about the trip, no expense was spared in the effort to impress the President’s personal attorney and a large entourage traveling with him, including the families of Parnas and Fruman. The trip was first reported by the Daily Beast. Giuliani told the Daily Beast he was there for business and vacation.

Parnas told CNN that Giuliani made two videos while there, and was told by Giuliani that they would serve two purposes. First, to help Betancourt, a Venezuelan energy executive who is looking to stave off potential criminal charges connected to a billion-dollar money-laundering case filed in Florida last year.

Second, the video was intended to show that Betancourt was of value to Juan Guaido, the head of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled parliament, who has been recognized by more than 50 countries, including the U.S, as the interim president.

“The purpose of the videos was 100 percent to show Trump how helpful Betancourt was to the Guaidos,” said Parnas. The Trump administration’s support for Guaido was on display this week. Guaido was a guest at the President’s State of the Union speech and spent two days in Washington meeting with Trump at the White House and members of the State Department. He received a standing ovation from both Republicans and Democrats when Trump referred to Guaido in his address, going on to call him the “true and legitimate president of Venezuela.”

A source familiar with Giuliani’s legal strategy confirms that Giuliani made video recordings for the Justice Department, but denies Parnas’ claim that any videos were intended for the President. There is no indication Giuliani showed the videos at the Justice Department or to Trump. The Justice Department declined to comment for this story. Betancourt and his lawyers did not respond to CNN requests for comment.

When asked about the trip to Madrid and the video-recordings of Betancourt, Giuliani had this to say in a text to CNN: “Your story about the interview[s] is given to you by not just an unreliable source, but a proven liar… I can’t discuss any tape recordings or confirm or deny them.”

Parnas, who does not possess the videos, is adamant the recordings were also intended for the President. “I would swear under oath that the purpose of the Guaido recording and the Betancourt recording was to be shown to President Trump — although Betancourt’s video was designed to be shown principally to the Justice Department and Barr.”

Lev Parnas wipes Giuliani’s face in London in 2019.

August in Spain

Parnas says he was often asked to arrange logistics for Giuliani and tend to the smallest of his needs. One photograph reviewed by CNN shows Parnas wiping Giuliani’s face.

Messages from Parnas’ cell phone that were handed over to House investigators for the impeachment hearing show that details of Giuliani’s trip to Madrid were organized by Parnas, who arranged for an airport greeter. “When you arrive in Madrid their [sic] will be someone waiting for you with a sign that says ‘NUBA’ at the door of the plane. They will take you through cotumes [sic].”

The trio’s first stop in Madrid was with Andriy Yermak, the right hand of Volodymyr Zelensky, the new Ukraine president.

After that, according to Parnas, a large group descended on the castle, El Castillo del Alamín. The group included Giuliani’s girlfriend, Dr. Maria Ryan and Wohl, as well as the Parnas and Fruman families. Wohl did not respond to request for comment, but a source close to Giuliani verified Parnas’ account of the guest list. A photo shows Giuliani sitting in a chair smoking a cigar with Ryan in his lap. Another has them posing for a photo with Betancourt in the background.

Wilmer Guaido at a castle outside Madrid.

Also in attendance was Wilmer Guaido, the taxi-driving father of Venezuela’s struggling opposition leader Juan Guaido, Parnas and another source told CNN. Wilmer Guaido is pictured in one of the images grabbing an hors d’oeuvre. He did not respond to questions from CNN about his presence at the castle. That the elder Guaido was at the gathering was first reported by Reuters.

During the trip, Parnas says that Giuliani set up his recording equipment on the castle grounds and made video interviews with both Betancourt and Wilmer Guaido. He also spoke with Juan Guaido via FaceTime, according to Parnas.

“Giuliani told me that Betancourt explained in his interview that he had given secret financial support to the Guaido family and regime,” Parnas told CNN. This would clearly put Betancourt in good standing with the President, since Guaido’s position is predicated on US support.

Betancourt and his lawyer have not responded to CNN for comment. Reuters reported that Guaido has denied any financial relationship to Betancourt. Reuters was not able to determine if Betancourt helped to finance the U.S.-backed opposition.

Betancourt, who has made millions from Venezuelan government contracts, was presumed to be a supporter of the rival, oppressive regime of the socialist Nicolas Maduro. The US has recognized Guaido and not Maduro as the official Venezuelan president since early 2019.

While in Spain, Giuliani told Parnas that he was confident he could get Betancourt’s legal problems “cleared up in a couple of weeks,” according to Parnas.

A month later, in September, Giuliani met with Justice Department officials to discuss Betancourt’s case and Barr dropped in on the meeting. A source familiar with the gathering says that the videos were not shown to Barr and would not comment on whether they were shown to lawyers there. The Justice Department declined to comment on the meeting.

Afterwards, Parnas says he met up with Giuliani at the Trump International hotel in DC. According to a conversation that Parnas says the two had, Giuliani appeared to think the meeting had gone well. But that was before Parnas and Fruman were arrested on indictments in early October followed by reports that Giuliani is under federal investigation.