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**AUGUST 1, 2025**

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I went to the University of Pennsylvania with a lot of billionaires’ kids, including Donald Trump Jr. (who was in my dorm and a subject of mockery because his dad at the time was supposedly “broke”). Immediately after October 7, 2023, a bunch of those same billionaires cut off donations to UPenn because of the supposed rampant antisemitism festering there, including Apollo CEO Marc Rowan.

Rowan became Apollo’s CEO after its founder was pushed out for having wired $188 million [link removed] to Jeffrey Epstein. Then another billionaire—Lex Wexner, a retail magnate with a long and close relationship with Epstein—joined the donor revolt. More followed suit. The ties between these billionaires tainted by associations with Epstein and their well-organized campaign to punish both critics of Israel and institutions that didn’t punish them sufficiently grew clearer. This piece is my attempt to grapple with those ties and to consider whether an institutional veneration for crime and predation is behind the undying loyalty to Israel you see within the donor class. Below is a preview; you can click the link at the end to read the whole thing at prospect.org [link removed].

**–Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor**

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Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA via AP Images

Make America Epstein Again [link removed]

Dahud Ortiz is a post-traumatic Marine Corps veteran who traveled to Madrid to kill an attorney who’d been chatting with his wife and ended up killing an associate and two clients instead, setting fire to the office to cover his tracks. **Vladimir Antonio Arevalo Chavez** [link removed] is a high-ranking MS-13 official who allegedly forged alliances with major Mexican drug organizations that ultimately cartelized the theretofore fragmented “coyote” business of migrating to the United States, putting poor border-crossers in debt to organized crime figures. Jose Hernandez Reyes is a low-level human smuggler and habitual drunk driver who until recently was scheduled to be deported a sixth time, after getting wasted and opening fire in a residential Texas neighborhood, then passing out in his car when he ran out of ammunition. Eric Adams allegedly took millions of dollars in direct bribes and illegal campaign contributions and is accused by a former police chief of transforming the New York Police Department into a “criminal enterprise” for enriching allies and illegally arresting and launching tabloid smear campaigns against political enemies. Imaad Zuberi was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for illegally laundering millions of dollars from the Qatari royal family and other Gulf state oligarchs into American political campaigns.

Trump’s Justice Department commuted Zuberi’s 12-year prison sentence in May, in possible gratitude for the Qatari plane, though a long-ago $900,000 donation to Trump’s first inaugural committee was cited by the press for his reasoning. The agency **dropped the Adams prosecution** [link removed] in February, in an explicit quid pro quo for agreeing to cooperate with extralegal immigration roundups. DOJ dismissed charges against MS-13 official Chavez in April as a favor to El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, whose secret back-channel alliances and negotiations with MS-13 had gotten him elected. It released Hernandez Reyes to a halfway house in June as a favor for agreeing to testify against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration accidentally sent to the El Salvadoran gulag. And it negotiated Ortiz’s release from a Venezuelan prison as part of the deal that released 252 Venezuelan nationals from said El Salvadoran gulag.

What is the common thread in the Trump regime springing all these people from prisons or indictments? Perhaps it can be found in a WhatsApp text written by Zuberi in 2017. “The joke going around in Washington establishment … is the bigger the scumbag the sooner you will be invited to the White House.” Zuberi himself had a wide array of clients, and during the Obama administration he would be contacted for meetings “from all scumbag [sic] of the world, warlords, kings, queens, presidents for life, military dictators, clan chiefs, tribal chiefs and etc.”

The writer Whitney Webb, whose 2022 two-part book series One Nation Under Blackmail analyzes the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking enterprise in the context of earlier deep state–sanctioned organized crime networks like Iran-Contra and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, observed on a recent podcast that Trump has long subscribed to his mentor and mafia lawyer Roy Cohn’s notion that every powerful man is the custodian of a “favor bank,” in which quid pro quos are brokered like loans and deposits. But banks (in theory anyway) have to lend out their reserves at a better rate of return than they pay on their deposits, and the bargains being made at this point lack any sense of reason or proportion.

It now looks increasingly likely that the Trump DOJ will apply similar tortured illogic used to drop charges against Adams in exchange for immigration cooperation to its dealings with convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for recruiting girls as young as 14 into sex slavery with Epstein. There is a notion that Trump will pardon Maxwell in exchange for “information” that incriminates MAGA enemies like the Clinton family and somehow absolves Trump himself, neglecting that Maxwell’s current lawyer David Markus recently represented Hillary Clinton in Trump’s racketeering lawsuit against her. At the same time, Democrats have displayed an illogical, giddy certainty that any and all new Epstein revelations will surely and chiefly embarrass Trump—assuming they can run the whole Russiagate playbook again but for real this time, and get better results.

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