An item in today's Politico substantiates suspicions that Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, the late Mossad-linked tycoon, Robert Maxwell, were Jeffrey Epstein's handlers and conduit to prominent Americans, including Donald Trump and the Clintons.

The article, "Meet the woman who ties Jeffrey Epstein to Trump and the Clintons
Heiress Ghislaine Maxwell paved the way to presidents", asks the leading question:

How did wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein come to be palling around with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump?

Politico provides many interesting details that go to the answer. First, it establishes that Ghislaine first approached Trump through connections made by her father, and she may have been the person to introduce Epstein to Trump. Ghislaine, who was granted immunity in the 2008 plea deal, is portrayed as having been the initiator of Epstein's shared sexual encounters with a then underage girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whom she recruited when Giuffre was working as a woman's changing room attendant at Trump's Florida club. She is also said to have been the conduit through which Epstein first met the Clintons, developing financial ties between them through charities run by both.

While providing many suggestive details about Maxwell, the article altogether skirts the back-story of the Maxwell family business: Robert Maxwell's well-documented decades-long espionage activities on behalf of Israel before his death in 1991, which included coordination of gun-running in the 1948 war and later in the Iran-Contra affair.

Here are some interesting pieces of the puzzle covered in the article: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/21/jeffrey-epstein-trump-clinton-...

• Trump’s ties to Maxwell and her late father, the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, meanwhile, go back even further, to at least the late 1980s.

"He really likes her,” said Steven Hoffenberg, a former mentor to Epstein who pleaded guilty in 1995 to running a massive Ponzi scheme, of Trump and Maxwell. “He was friendly with her father.”

• An item from a May 1989 gossip column placed Trump and both Maxwells together at a party aboard the elder Maxwell’s yacht, named the Lady Ghislaine, that featured caviar flown in from Paris and former Republican senator John Tower of Texas. The item notes that Trump compared his own larger yacht with Maxwell’s.

The article reminds us that Trump had bought his yacht from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi -- uncle of the slain Washington Post contributor Jamal and (unmentioned, a principal in the Iran-Contra affair) -- and Maxwell’s yacht, "Lady Ghislaine", was also purchased second-hand from one of the Khashoggi brothers.

The Politico piece goes on:

• Robert Maxwell’s biographer later related an incident from around the same period when Ghislaine was working for one of her father’s business enterprises selling corporate gifts. While planning a trip to New York, she asked her father to use his friendship with Trump to get her a meeting with the mogul.

Politico makes it clear that that Robert Maxwell's daughter, Ghislaine, was the primary conduit through which Epstein was introduced to leading American politicians, including two Presidents, who would later figure large in the Maxwell-Epstein sex scandal.

• It is not clear whether [Ghislaine] Maxwell first introduced Trump and Epstein, who socialized together at least as early as 1992, but Maxwell was crucial in ensuring Epstein’s access to Trump’s world. Archival video unearthed on Wednesday by NBC from that year shows Trump and Epstein surrounded by dancing women at Mar-a-Lago, with Maxwell smiling in the background.

• According to “Filthy Rich,” a 2016 book about Epstein by best-selling author and Mar-a-Lago member James Patterson, “Although Epstein had never properly joined the club, Trump’s friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell gave Epstein unlimited use of the facilities.”
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former changing room attendant at Mar-a-Lago who has accused Epstein of sexually abusing her as a minor, alleges in a lawsuit that she was first approached at the club in 1998 by Ghislaine Maxwell, who convinced her to meet Epstein and joined him in the abuse. Maxwell has denied wrongdoing.

[ . . . ]

• [Ghislaine] Maxwell first grew close with the Clintons after Bill Clinton left office, vacationing on a yacht with Chelsea Clinton in 2009, attending her wedding in 2010, and participating in the Clinton Global Initiative as recently as 2013, years after her name first emerged in accounts of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse.

Indeed, it was Ghislaine Maxwell who had earlier been introduced to British royalty and high society by her father, who in turn introduced Epstein to the same circles.

• According to the Daily Telegraph, it was Maxwell who introduced Epstein to the British royal, whose association with the sex offender has been a long-running scandal in the United Kingdom. Epstein also attended a birthday party for Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in 2000. That same year, Maxwell and Prince Andrew attended what The Daily Mail described as a “hookers and pimps”-themed Halloween party hosted by Heidi Klum.

While providing some dots, this article like others, refuses to connect them with other publicly available evidence of the Maxwell family's special relationship spanning decades with Israeli intelligence. Nor is there any reference to the rampant child sex abuse scandals involving ranking UK politicians and intelligence officials that have been a staple of the British tabloid press, including Maxwell's Mail press syndicate, since the early 1960s.

In one 1986 flair-up, Ghislaine takes center stage as the alleged victim of a blackmail scheme in a political sex scandal. In what turned out to be an entrapment scheme of Harvey Proctor, a Conservative MP, arranged by The People, one of Maxwell's tabloids. Proctor was prosecuted for underage sexual relations.

The Harvey Proctor angle opens up a whole sewer of UK paedophiles

who inhabit the Conservative Party and the upper echelons of the British security apparatus. It led to a very real catch-up 2014 investigation of Proctor and the former chief of MI5 (deceased) and Head of the Home Office (deceased) on charges of abuse of underage boys and murder of a prostitute decades earlier. Operation Midland is also known as the Dolphin Square affair, for the London apartments that reportedly served for many years as the site of a homosexual paedophile ring catering to Tory politicians and intelligence officers before Scotland Yard finally took public interest.

Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath (deceased) was also named as a homosexual paedophile. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/19/claims-sir-edward-heath-paed...

Two years later, Proctor, who was actually convicted in 1987 of having sex with an underage man (underage by UK law at the time) was cleared in 2016 of the Dolphin Square sex club charges.

The wrap-up of Operation Midland published in the rival Telegraph newspaper called the 1986 events involving Harvey Proctor and Ghislaine Maxwell a "sting" by Robert Maxwell's The People. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/harvey-proctor-to-claim-coun...

When you put this into the context of the Profumo-Cristine Keeler prostitution and spy scandals of the early 1960s, sexual blackmail and espionage seems to be simply politics by other means, as well as a providing a splendid living for many (including tabloid publishers), in Great Britain.

This is the decades-long backstory involving intelligence and underage sex scandals that the U.S. media misses in its coverage of Epstein.

Ghislaine was used by Robert Maxwell's tabloid as part of a dirty-tricks operation to out Harvey Proctor, MP, a homosexual MP in the opposition Conservative party. As it so happens, Proctor was in fact having relations with an underage man, and he was later convicted for that. This is against the backdrop, better exposed in the UK, of paedophile rings involving a number of ranking Tories along with military and intelligence officers, including Peter Hayman, the Deputy Director of MI-6, along with a decades-long government coverup of that fact. To long-time readers of British tabloids, none of this comes as a surprise.

Also better known in the UK, Robert Maxwell, when he was not putting together sex stings exposing political opponents, was himself running espionage, arms dealing and money laundering operations on a vast scale as a Mossad agent of influence. That's the context and backstory that's been otherwise ignored by the US press in the Epstein-Maxwell trafficking case. There's a family history of these things involving Ghislaine, here, that's not yet been covered here.

Add this for context: "The Westminster Paedophile Dossier"

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier

A dossier on paedophiles allegedly associated with the British government was assembled by the British Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens, who handed it to the then-Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, in 1984. The whereabouts of the dossier is unknown, along with other files on organised child abuse that had been held by the Home Office.[1]

In 2013, the Home Office stated that all relevant information had been passed to the police, and that Dickens' dossier had not been retained. It was later disclosed that 114 documents concerning child abuse allegations were missing. In July 2014, the Labour Party called for a new inquiry into the way that the allegations had been handled, and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, ordered the permanent secretary of the Home Office, Mark Sedwill, to investigate the circumstances of the lost dossier.

On 7 July 2014, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced a review into the handling of historic child abuse allegations, to be led by Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, and the establishment of a public panel inquiry into the duty of care taken in the protection of children from paedophiles by British public institutions, led by an independent panel of experts and chaired by Baroness Butler-Sloss. Butler-Sloss later stood down as chair of the inquiry.[2] On 5 September 2014, it was announced that it would instead be chaired by Fiona Woolf[3] but on 31 October 2014 she, too, resigned from the role.[4] On 4 February 2015 it was announced that the inquiry would be chaired by Justice Lowell Goddard, a New Zealand High Court judge. The existing panel would be disbanded, and the inquiry would be given new powers.[5] On 4 August 2016, she also resigned from the role.[6]

And to be specific, for one there is the former Dep. Dir. MI6,

Peter Hayman, described in his official biography as a career British diplomat who served in a number of important posts, including:

director general of the British Information Services in New York[4] (1961–64) and then deputy commandant of the British military government in West Berlin from 1964 to 1966. He returned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, becoming Deputy Under Secretary of State with responsibility for the United Nations and Eastern Europe from 1969 to 1970.[1] Then, from 1970 to 1974, he served as High Commissioner of the United Kingdom to Canada.
The Independent stated in his obituary that he started a commercial career in 1974, upon retirement at age 60.[3] However The Guardian reported in 2014 that he later served in the intelligence services, and was "long-time deputy director of MI6".[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hayman_(diplomat)

As one reads down Director Hayman's Wiki bio, we come to this about the Hon. Peter Hayman:

Paedophilia

Main article: Westminster paedophile dossier

In October 1978, Hayman left a package of paedophilia-related material on a London bus. The police traced the package and discovered that Hayman, under the pseudonym "Peter Henderson", had used an apartment in Bayswater, London, to conduct obscene correspondence. In the apartment, police found 45 diaries describing six years of "sexual fantasies" concerning children and activities with prostitutes, articles of female clothing and obscene literature. He was investigated by police but released without charge after being given a warning not to send obscene material through the post.[7][8]

In November 1980, Private Eye magazine revealed this event.[9] In 1981, using parliamentary privilege, MP Geoffrey Dickens asked why Hayman had not been prosecuted,[10][11] with Dickens saying: "How did such a potential blackmail risk come to hold highly sensitive posts at the MOD and NATO?" He also asked the Leader of the House of Commons to "investigate the security implications of diaries found in the diplomat's London flat which contained accounts of sexual exploits".[12] The Attorney-General Michael Havers replied, "I am in agreement with the Director of Public Prosecutions' (Sir Thomas Chalmers Hetherington QC) advice not to prosecute Sir Peter Hayman and the other persons with whom he had carried on an obscene correspondence"[13] adding that, while Hayman had been found to have received pornographic material through the post, it was not of an extreme nature, was non-commercial and in a sealed envelope, so did not warrant prosecution.[14] There was much debate and condemnation in the international press of these events.[15]

In April 1981 Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General, said in parliament that, while Hayman was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, he was never a member of the executive committee, so was not prosecuted as others were for publishing contact advertisements.[16][17] In 1984, Hayman was convicted and fined for an act of gross indecency with another adult in a public lavatory.[1][10][18] The Prime Minister warned Hayman that, should he be known to repeat the offence, he would be stripped of his honours.[18]

On 29 November 1985, Dickens complained in the House of Commons that he had suffered harassment following his naming of Hayman. "The noose around my neck grew tighter after I named a former high-flying British diplomat on the Floor of the House. Honourable Members will understand that where big money is involved and as important names came into my possession so the threats began. First, I received threatening telephone calls followed by two burglaries at my London home. Then, more seriously, my name appeared on a multi-killer's hit list."[19] The Independent newspaper in February 2013 could find no corroboration for Dickens' claims in 1985.[19]

On 30 January 2015, it was revealed that a file was found in the National Archives titled "SECURITY. Sir Peter Hayman: allegations against former public official of unnatural sexual proclivities; security aspects".[20] The file is dated from October 1980 to March 1981.[21] One document within the file related to the briefing given to then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher concerning Hayman's sexual fantasies related to children. The document also stated that there was no evidence these fantasies had been carried out. A further document outlined the official reaction and response to be made by government ministers if questioned about his 1978 arrest. A different document states that Hayman was vulnerable to blackmail by foreign powers because of his "sexual perversion", but foreign security services were not yet aware.[20]

Indeed, the depravity of the ruling classes and upper ranks of the security services leaves an awful lot of opportunity for blackmail. That's an awful lot of context for Politico, and the rest of the American press, to altogether miss.