Why does no one connect Ghislaine Maxwell and Antony Blinken

[Brutus Frank]

Ghislaine Maxwell, the notorious girlfriend of and child-procurer for Jeffrey Epstein, has a family connection to sitting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s family: their fathers were the closest of friends. This known connection seems boggling to have escaped the eye of the current media, yet a cursory examination of their publicly available histories appears to demonstrate the shocking fact.

Antony Blinken comes from a political dynasty family in the US. His father, Donald Mayer Blinken (born November 11, 1925) is an American businessman and former diplomat. He was a director and one of the founders of E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company, an investment bank in New York. He served as the board chairman of the State University of New York from 1978 to 1990 and as United States Ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1997. Antony’s Uncle, Alan John Blinken, is an American businessman, political candidate, and former diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Belgium from 1993 to 1997. Blinken was also the Democratic nominee in the 2002 United States Senate election in Idaho, losing to incumbent Larry Craig. He has also hosted a 2019 fundraiser for current US President Joe Biden.

Though not directly related, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s step-father Samuel Pisar was notorious British publisher and swindler Robert Maxwell’s lawyer, closest confidant, and apparently the last man to speak to him alive before Maxwells drowned body was found outside of his yacht, naked. This was written off as unsuspicious, as Robert Maxwell had a penchant for nude urination in the ocean. His body was found after apparently having fallen from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.

Pisar was born in Białystok, Poland, to Jewish parents David and Helaina (née Suchowolska) Pisar. His father established the region’s first taxi service. His parents and younger sister Frieda were murdered in the Holocaust. Pisar was sent to Majdanek, Bliżyn, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Dachau and ultimately to the Engelberg Tunnel near Leonberg. At the end of the war, he escaped during a death march; after making a break into the forest, he found refuge in a US tank. He is the only Holocaust survivor of the 900 children of his Polish school.

Blinken is fond of telling his stepfathers story as a tale of one sided US beneficence, but Samuel Pisar remembered it differently: “I was saved by the battle of Stalingrad, which was the turning part of the war, and the Red Army Offensive,” he said in a 2010 interview with the Russian media outlet RIA Novosti. “For me, during the Second World War, Russia was a savior. I consider my saviors to be the Russian and American armies. You can criticize Stalin, the Gulag, and other things that happened in Russia from 1920 to 1930, but the heroism, sacrifice, and victory of Russia in the war against Fascism cannot be questioned, it is sacred.”

After the liberation, Pisar spent a year and a half in the American occupation zone of Germany, engaging in black marketeering with fellow survivors. He was rescued by an aunt living in Paris. An uncle sent him to Melbourne, Australia, where he resumed his studies. He attended George Taylor and Staff School (now Taylors College) and went on to attain a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne in 1953. After recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, he traveled to the United States and earned a juris doctor from Harvard University. He also held a doctorate from the Sorbonne.

Ian Robert Maxwell MC (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch; 10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a British media proprietor, former member of Parliament (MP), suspected spy, and fraudster. Originally from Czechoslovakia, Maxwell rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire. After his death, huge discrepancies in his companies’ finances were revealed, including his fraudulent misappropriation of the Mirror Group pension fund.

Early in his life, Maxwell, then an Orthodox Jew, escaped from Nazi occupation, joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile during World War II and was decorated after active service in the British Army. In subsequent years he worked in publishing, building up Pergamon Press to a major publishing house. After six years as a Labour MP during the 1960s, Maxwell again put all his energy into business, successively buying the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers and Macmillan Publishers, among other publishing companies.

Maxwell led a flamboyant life, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, or sailed in his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. He was litigious and often embroiled in controversy. In 1989, Maxwell had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. On 5 November 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

Maxwell’s death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans. His sons briefly attempted to keep the business together, but failed as the news emerged that the elder Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies’ pension funds. The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992.

Robert Maxwell was born into a poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in the small town of Slatinské Doly, in the region of Carpathian Ruthenia, Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno, Ukraine).His parents were Mechel Hoch and Hannah Slomowitz. He had six siblings. In 1939, the area was reclaimed by Hungary. Most members of Maxwell’s family were murdered in Auschwitz after Hungary was occupied in 1944 by Nazi Germany, but he had years earlier escaped to France. In May 1940, he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille.

After the fall of France and the British retreat to Britain, Maxwell took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak Army, and with 500 other soldiers he was transferred to the Pioneer Corps and later to the North Staffordshire Regiment in 1943. He was then involved in action across Europe, from the Normandy beaches to Berlin, and achieved the rank of sergeant. Maxwell gained a commission in 1945 and was promoted to the rank of captain.

In January 1945, Maxwell’s heroism in “storming a German machine-gun nest” during the war won him the Military Cross, presented by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Attached to the Foreign Office, he served in Berlin during the next two years in the press section. Maxwell naturalised as a British subject on 19 June 1946 and changed his name by deed of change of name on 30 June 1948.

After the war, Maxwell used contacts in the Allied occupation authorities to go into business, becoming the British and US distributor for Springer Verlag, a publisher of scientific books. In 1951, he bought three-quarters of Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher; the remaining quarter was held by the experienced scientific editor Paul Rosbaud. They changed the name of the company to Pergamon Press and rapidly built it into a major publishing house.

In 1964, representing the Labour Party, Maxwell was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham and re-elected in 1966. He gave an interview to The Times in 1968, in which he said the House of Commons provided him with a problem. “I can’t get on with men”, he commented. “I tried having male assistants at first. But it didn’t work. They tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss.” Maxwell lost his seat in 1970 to Conservative challenger William Benyon. He contested Buckingham again in both 1974 general elections, but without success.

A hint of Maxwell’s service to Israel was provided by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, who described Maxwell’s contacts with Czechoslovak communist leaders in 1948 as crucial to the Czechoslovak decision to arm Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Czechoslovak military assistance was both unique and crucial for Israel as it battled for its existence. According to Loftus and Aarons, it was Maxwell’s covert help in smuggling aircraft parts into Israel that led to the country having air superiority during their 1948 war of independence.

The Foreign Office suspected that Maxwell was a secret agent of a foreign government, possibly a double agent or a triple agent, and “a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia“. He had known links to the British Secret Intelligence Service(MI6), to the Soviet KGB, and to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence services attended Maxwell’s funeral in Israel, while Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogised him and stated: “He has done more for Israel than can today be told.”

Shortly before Maxwell’s death, a former employee of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, Ari Ben-Menashe, approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the US with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror‘s foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, were both long-time agents for Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that, in 1986, Maxwell informed the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu revealed information about Israel’s nuclear capability to The Sunday Times, then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for eighteen years.

Ben-Menashe’s story was ignored at first, but eventually journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option, Hersh’s book about Israel’s nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1991, Labour MP George Galloway and Conservative MP Rupert Allason (also known as espionage author Nigel West) agreed to raise the issue in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege protection, which in turn allowed British newspapers to report events without fear of libel suits. Maxwell called the claims “ludicrous, a total invention” and sacked Davies. A year later, in Galloway’s libel settlement against Mirror Group Newspapers (in which he received “substantial” damages), Galloway’s counsel announced that the MP accepted that the group’s staff had not been involved in Vanunu’s abduction. Galloway referred to Maxwell as “one of the worst criminals of the century”.

On 4 November 1991, Maxwell had an argumentative phone call with his son Kevin over a meeting scheduled with the Bank of England on Maxwell’s default on £50,000,000 in loans. Maxwell missed the meeting, instead travelling to his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in the Canary Islands, Spain.

On 5 November, Maxwell was last in contact with the crew of Lady Ghislaine at 4:25 a.m. local time, but was found to be missing later in the morning. It has been speculated that Maxwell was urinating into the ocean nude at the time, as he often did. He was presumed to have fallen overboard from the vessel, which was cruising off the Canary Islands, southwest of Spain. Maxwell’s naked body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and taken to Las Palmas. Besides a “graze to his left shoulder”, there were no noticeable wounds on Maxwell’s body. The official ruling at an inquest held in December 1991 was death by a heart attack combined with accidental drowning, although three pathologists had been unable to agree on the cause of his death at the inquest; he had been found to have been suffering from serious heart and lung conditions. Murder was ruled out by the judge and, in effect, so was suicide. His son discounted the possibility of suicide, saying, “I think it is highly unlikely that he would have taken his own life, it wasn’t in his makeup or his mentality.”

Maxwell was afforded a lavish funeral in Israel, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence and many dignitaries and politicians, both government and opposition, and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Herzog delivered the eulogy and the Kaddish was recited by his fellow Holocaust survivor, friend and longtime attorney Samuel Pisar.

British Prime Minister John Major said Maxwell had given him “valuable insights” into the situation in the Soviet Union during the attempted coup of 1991. He was a “great character”, Major added. Neil Kinnock, then Labour Party leader, spoke of him as a man with “a zest for life” who “attracted controversy, envy and loyalty in great measure throughout his rumbustious life.”

A production crew conducting research for Maxwell, a 2007 biographical film by the BBC, uncovered tapes stored in a suitcase owned by his former head of security, John Pole. Later in his life, Maxwell had become increasingly paranoid about his own employees and had the offices of those he suspected of disloyalty bugged so he could hear their conversations. After Maxwell’s death, the tapes remained in Pole’s suitcase and were discovered by the researchers only in 2007.

Maxwell’s death triggered instability for his publishing empire, with banks frantically calling in their massive loans. Despite the efforts of his sons Kevin and Ian, the Maxwell companies soon collapsed. It emerged that, without adequate prior authorisation, Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds to shore up the shares of the Mirror Group to save his companies from bankruptcy. Eventually, the pension funds were replenished with money from investment banks Shearson Lehman and Goldman Sachs, as well as the British government. This replenishment was limited and also supported by a surplus in the printers’ fund, which was taken by the government in part payment of £100 million required to support the workers’ state pensions. The rest of the £100 million was waived. Maxwell’s theft of pension funds was therefore partly repaid from public funds. The result was that in general, pensioners received about half of their company pension entitlement.

This man had a Protege: His name was Jeffrey Epstein. And Maxwell introduced his daughter, Ghislaine, to him.

Frenchman Jean-Luc Brunel, a model scout pal of Epstein, is said to have disclosed Maxwell’s involvement to friends almost 20 years ago.

The claim has since been passed onto US lawyers investigating Epstein’s crimes and those of his alleged co-conspirators, in the form of sworn testimony.

A former close associate of Brunel told The Sun: “He was having a conversation with some acquaintances in New York City around 2002.

“Jean-Luc was telling them how Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell was one of the reasons why Jeffrey Epstein had money. He said Maxwell had been one of Epstein’s early investment clients. I assumed that Maxwell had invested in Epstein, who then used that money to make his own.“

Former Wall Street trader Epstein rose to prominence in the financial world in the 1980s, founding his own money management firm. The company was formed to manage the assets of clients with more than $1billion and included Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner.

According to the latest episode of the Broken: Seeking Justice podcast, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell met as early as 1988 through her father, said convicted Ponzi schemer Steve Hoffenberg (who once worked with Epstein), who also claimed for the first time that Epstein and Robert Maxwell had business dealings together, although the podcast could not corroborate this.

Two additional sources backed up the claim that Robert Maxwell was the person who brought his prized daughter together with Epstein, including a former Epstein staffer who was told by Ghislaine Maxwell while she forced them to look at eight albums’ worth of photos from her father’s funeral.

Ghislaine Maxwell told the staffer that Epstein was someone who could take care of her “emotionally,” and was firm that his finances weren’t the source of her interest, according to the podcast, which aligns with reports that the pair dated at one point, and remained friends.

Robert Maxwell might have been a source of Epstein’s wealth, according to the podcast, citing a 2010 deposition from bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez in a Florida civil lawsuit, in which she says Maxwell “started” Epstein’s money, a claim only previously reported by tabloid The Sun through an anonymous source.

Vasquez also said in the deposition that Epstein “had a relationship with a woman, that her father was very wealthy, and that’s how he started his own money.”

Lawyers for Maxwell did not respond to requests by Forbes to confirm how she met Epstein or if Robert Maxwell was a source of Epstein’s wealth.

As to who might be able to find that information? Perhaps United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken might have some insight.

[Brutus Frank]

However the wildest thing about Robert Maxwell was that he owned Judge Dredd and 2000AD. Completely forgot to add that.

[Brutus Frank]

I think my next batshit article is gonna be about how the lyrics of Werewolves of London are all about MKUltra agents. That's what I've got the most notes for right now.