Stan Pottinger and Epstein Join Forces
Epstein was sacked by Bear Stearns in 1981, and then he joined forces with Stan Pottinger to pitch “tax-avoidance strategies to wealthy clients.” The New York Times notes that Pottinger had left a “senior post in the Justice Department.” According to the timeline of “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons,” Epstein was employed by Douglas Leese as he pitched “tax-avoidance strategies” with Pottinger. Though the Times never mentions how Epstein met Pottinger, it notes that decades after the fact Pottinger would represent “scores” of Epstein victims.
Thus far, the New York Times has buttressed its thesis of rejecting Epstein’s links to intelligence by downplaying the role of Leese as Mr. Fixit and utterly ignoring Epstein’s connection to Khashoggi. But the Times irrevocably damages its thesis by uniting Epstein and Pottinger.
Over the years, I’ve marveled at Pottinger’s unbridled corruption initially for the Department of Justice and also his treasonous machinations for the CIA, because he seems to have a gene that encodes for Teflon. Since Pottinger has been unscathed by legal consequences throughout his decades of malfeasance, I feel compelled to take the reader on a scenic route through the highlights of his crimes and coverups.
The New York Times is correct when it describes Pottinger as having a “senior post in the Justice Department.” Pottinger became an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1973. In a March 30th, 1974, article, the Times even denotes Pottinger as a “civil rights protector.”
At the Justice Department, Pottinger would become the Forrest Gump of coverups. In 1974, he perpetrated his first major coverup, which involved National Guard soldiers murdering four students at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. The murders were immortalized by Neil Young’s “Ohio.”
The National Guard soldiers had been acquitted of murder, but distraught families and friends, and also concerned citizens implored the Justice Department to further investigate the case, because it was suspected that the soldiers were acting on orders when they murdered the four students. Pottinger assured all that justice would be meted out. “Until you exhaust your ability to ask questions, have you really done your job?” he said before impaneling a grand jury.
The federal grand jury indicted eight of the soldiers for violating the civil rights of the students. I guess murder could be considered a civil rights violation, but, nonetheless, civil rights violations seem rather inconsequential for such a crime. The soldiers ultimately faced 1-year of imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. The grand jury ruled that the soldiers had acted impromptu without orders from a superior officer, so the massacre did not entail a conspiracy. A judge ultimately acquitted the soldiers.
In 2007, a tape of the massacre surfaced. A voice is heard on the tape, shouting: "Get Set!" “Point!” "Fire!" The Justice Department had a copy of that tape during the grand jury that Pottinger impaneled, and it contracted an acoustics firm in Massachusetts to analyze it. The firm offered Pottinger and the Justice Department plausible deniability when it declared that no National Guard voices were audible on the tape.
With supple ease, Pottinger segued into the coverup of COINTELPRO. According to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities or Church Committee that was conducted in 1975 and 1976, COINTELPRO involved:
“The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone ‘bugs’, surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”
The Church Committee notes one of the “unsavory and vicious tactics” perpetrated by COINTELPRO against Martin Luther King Jr.: “The FBI mailed Dr. King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in his hotel rooms which one agent testified was an attempt to destroy Dr. King's marriage. The tape recording was accompanied by a note which Dr. King and his advisors interpreted as threatening to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide.”
The Church Committee was very thorough with regards to COINTELPRO: “This report is based on a staff study of more than 20,000 pages of Bureau documents, depositions of many of the Bureau agents involved in the programs, and interviews of several COINTELPRO targets. The examples selected for discussion necessarily represent a small percentage of the more than 2,000 approved COINTELPRO actions.”
Pottinger sums up his thoughts on COINTELPRO in a December 13, 1974 memorandum to Attorney General Saxbe: “…upon the completion of this brief examination of COINTELPRO, that the Division found "no basis for making criminal charges against particular individuals or involving particular incidents." Although some of the acts reviewed appeared "to amount to technical violations," the Division concludes that "without more" information, prosecutive action would not be justified under its "normal criteria."
So, the civil rights protector would conclude that wiretaps, microphone ‘bugs’, surreptitious mail opening, break-ins, and the other unsavory and vicious tactics of COINTELPRO had no bearing on an Americans’ civil rights.
The Church Committee discovered that as the FBI was perpetrating COINTELPRO, the CIA was perpetrating OPERATION CHAOS, its domestic spying program that entailed:
However, Pottinger dispensed a dire warning to Helms, because, before the Senate, he testified that the CIA had not conducted domestic surveillance. “…his Congressional testimony is under review for possible perjury charges.” A November 1, 1997 New York Times article recounts the wrath Helms faced for lying to the Senate: He pleaded “no contest” to two misdemeanors, and he was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended sentence.
The Justice Department’s United States v. Banks is an example of Pottinger’s unadulterated venality. In 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM), in part, reacting to the dissension sown by COINTELPRO occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 Native American massacre. The New York Times reports that Pottinger was Johnny-on-the-spot: “J. Stanley Pottinger, the government's chief negotiator at the scene, said late today the insurgents holding the village had reportedly received rifle fire from the prairies and ‘we conclude’ the shots were fired by ousted residents of the historic Indian village.” Pottinger warned, “It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Appeasing Sioux elders, AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means relinquished their occupation of the village. A federal grand jury, overseen by Pottinger, indicted 185 native Americans on multiple charges associated with the occupation, including conspiracy, arson, theft, assault, illegal possession of firearms, and interfering with federal officers.
Pottinger and the Justice Department planned to imprison Banks and Means for ad infinitum, but the truth can often be inconvenient. The trial judge discovered that the FBI had altered or suppressed key documents, committed illegal electronic surveillance, and had probably persuaded law enforcement officials in River Falls, Wisconsin to drop rape and sodomy charges against the government’s star witness. The judge also states that the special agent in charge of the Minnesota Division of the FBI, which covers three states, including South Dakota, had perjured himself on the witness stand. He dismissed all of the charges against Banks and Means.
Stan Pottinger: CIA Asset and Arms Dealer
After a government career of coverups, Pottinger committed high treason by facilitating an arms deal between the CIA and Iran, an enemy combatant state of the U.S. In 1979, a coup fomented by Ayatollah Khomeini, a high-ranking Shia Muslim, overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran. And on November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and took 52 American hostages for 444 days. The Iranian hostage impasse made President Jimmy Carter look extremely feeble. His administration attempted to rescue the hostages on April 24, 1980, but two of the rescue helicopters crashed and eight service men were killed.
In early July of 1980, Carter State Department officials and Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian arms dealer and “client” of Pottinger’s, “arranged” for Pottinger to meet the nephew of Ayatollah Khomeini, Reza Passendideh, in Madrid to discuss resuming negotiations for release of the American hostages. Pottinger, however, pulled off a switcharoo in Madrid. He was not acting on behalf of the Carter administration—he was acting on behalf of the CIA and Reagan campaign.
After the Iranian revolution had been sparked by Khomeini, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr became the President of Iran. On December 17, 1992, Bani-Sadr sent a letter to Congress elucidating the outcome of the Pottinger and Passendideh meeting in Madrid. He writes that he expected a proposal from the Carter administration, but Passendideh returned with a plan "from the Reagan camp."
Bani-Sadr, a moderate, sought to release the hostages immediately, but Passendideh and Khomeini made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. "Passendideh told me that if I do not accept this proposal, they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my [radical Iranian] rivals. He further said that they [the Republicans] have enormous influence in the CIA. Lastly, he [Passendideh] told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination."
Shortly thereafter, Bani-Sadr fled Iran.
A New York Times article from July 7, 1984, reveals that in 1980 Pottinger was ensnared by the FBI in an illegal arms deal with the Iranians: “Pottinger is caught on tape instructing the Hashemis how to ship the arms without disclosing “the identity of the parties involved and the true destination of the goods.”
U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, a paragon of integrity, was prosecuting the case, and he dispensed an ambiguous quote about Pottinger’s pending fate. “The investigation of Mr. Pottinger is still continuing,” he said. “It would be unfair to make a judgment at this point.”
But a July 14, 1984, Washington Post article, illuminated an extremely bizarre sequence of events. “According to a high-level federal official who asked not to be identified, Pottinger was to be indicted last month, but several tape recordings of Pottinger's meetings with the Hashemis have been misplaced. … The FBI reportedly has partial transcripts of the tapes, but Pottinger's attorneys argue they are insufficient evidence.”
And Pottinger walked, even though he committed high treason and myriad other crimes.
The timeline offered by “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons” has Epstein and Pottinger working together, pitching “tax-avoidance strategies,” from approximately 1981 to approximately 1983. The timeline of the Times also has Epstein working concurrently with Leese who played an integral role in the 1983 $1.3 billion arms deal between China and Iran. The previously quoted Times article, from July 7, 1984, reported that Pottinger was caught on a wiretap instructing Cyrus Hashemi to fabricate the particulars of the arms deal to Iran on December 10, 1980. Though there isn’t a definitive timeline when Epstein and Pottinger jointly pitched “tax-avoidance strategies,” it’s realistic to extrapolate that both were trafficking arms to Iran during the early 1980s.
Drop Site News sums up the nefarious endeavor devised by Epstein, Pottinger, and the CIA. "...the CIA used Israel as a middleman to move off-the-books weapons to Iran. In the early 1980s, under the CIA’s supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas “dummy companies”—in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling “tax-avoidance” strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. … Pottinger’s system eventually gave rise to a network of covert intermediaries shipping arms around the world; the CIA’s profits became a slush fund used to illegally bankroll the insurgent Contra army, who waged a war against Nicaragua’s leftist government while simultaneously trafficking cocaine to the United States.”
I’ve come to have profound respect for Drop Site News, but Pottinger’s initial foray into arms trafficking to the Iranians was not the Iran-Contra affair. He was pouring the foundation for the October Surprise. An October Surprise is an unexpected political event or revelation a month before a presidential election, especially one that seems intended to influence the outcome.
The Carter administration hoped that a return of the hostages in October would give Carter an electoral boost and deliver a second term as president. But the CIA and Reagan campaign ensured the Iranians an abundance of arms if they detained the American hostages until Reagan won the 1980 election. On January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as the 40th president of the United States, the 52 U.S. captives held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, were released, ending the 444-day Iran hostage crisis.
Shortly after the hostages were returned, echoes of a dirty deal between the Reagan camp and the Iranians began to resonate from former Carter administration personnel. In 1991, those echoes became increasingly amplified when Gary Sick, a former National Security Council aide for Iran under Carter, Ford, and Reagan, published a book, October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, alleging that the 1980 Reagan campaign conspired with Iranian officials to delay the release of U.S. hostages.
In the Senate, Republicans filibustered a full-scale investigation into October Surprise. So, only the Senate’s Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs conducted a cursory, underfunded inquiry into the October Surprise, and it concluded there was no evidence of a secret deal or that the campaign delayed the hostage release.
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell was in Epstein’s Black Book, and Epstein had multiple contact numbers for him. Moreover, Epstein trafficking victim Virginia Roberts also testified that she had been molested by Mitchell. His secrets may have made him susceptible to kompromat.
However, the House conducted a full-scale, amply funded inquiry into the October Surprise—"Task Force of the Committee on Foreign Affairs to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of Americans as Hostages by Iran in 1980.” The Task Force would conduct a comprehensive investigation, including 15 federal legislators, 16 counsels, and 29 assistants.
The Task Force produced a 982-page tome that mentioned Pottinger’s name 174 times.
Witnesses called by the Task Force testified that former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush, and future vice president under Reagan, and also William Casey, Reagan campaign manager, and the director of the CIA under Reagan, were integral to the secret deal with Iran. Bush’s name is mentioned 549 times, and Casey’s name is mentioned 1,215 times. But according to the Task Force, the arms dealers and CIA assets who testified were not credible. Ergo, the Task Force concluded that the Reagan campaign and/or the CIA had not made a secret deal with the Iranians.
However, on March 19, 2023, the New York Times published an article, “43-Year Secret of Sabotage: Mission to Subvert Carter Is Revealed,” which declared that the Reagan campaign had indeed made a covert pact with Iran. It was imperative that Pottinger’s high treason was covered up, because, otherwise, the Reagan campaign’s high treason was susceptible to being exposed. It's very scary that the “October Surprise” could ostensibly be so thoroughly investigated, but, yet, serve Americans a surfeit of lies. The U.S. Congress twisted truth into lies and lies into truths.
Though afield of the scope of this blog, I feel compelled to mention that Pottinger had a nine-year relationship with a fellow CIA asset—Gloria Steinem—that wended through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Steinem was the director of the CIA-funded Independent Research Service, which recruited American students to disrupt Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962. Steinem maintained that she “essentially folded” the Independent Research Service in 1960, even though it infiltrated a World Youth Festival in Helsinki in 1962. Moreover, a January 1, 1977 article from the feminist magazine Meeting Ground provides evidence that Steinem was a CIA asset throughout, in the very least, most of the 1960s, because the Independent Research Service had an office in Washington, DC until 1967. One possible reason for Steinem to lie about the duration of her tenure with the CIA could be that it continued much longer than throughout the 1960s.
