I just finished reading One Nation Under Blackmail, by Whitney Webb, and the whole FTX thing is making my my spider sense tingle. As an author and internet sleuth I’ve come to recognize patterns of behavior over time. When you investigate a topic, you usually start by identifying these patterns and recognizing names and organizations and dynamics that you’ve seen before in a different context. 

Webb’s book uses the Jeffery Epstein child-sex scandal as a takeoff but is ultimately about the intersection of intelligence, organized crime and finance, with an emphasis on how the US deep state is able to carry out covert operations around the world by using hidden funds derived from the sale of drugs while blackmailing elites. Epstein, a prolific pedophile who was, by all appearances, running a “honeypot” operation on prominent men, was found dead in his US jail cell in 2019. The honeypot operation involved filming these prominent individuals having sex with minors.

Since WWII the US has carried out hundreds of covert operations using terror groups and criminals and paying them with money from drug sales, all largely without the knowledge of the American public, thereby keeping the whole messy business off the books. Drugs and US intelligence are intertwined to such a degree that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The War on Drugs was always a dark comedy since the biggest drug lord is the CIA, who infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.

To utilize the drug money there has to be ways in which to “launder” it and move it into legitimate banks and businesses, and this is where the intersection of finance comes in. The dirty little secret is that many respectable banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions depend on money derived from criminal activities. For instance after the Wall Street Crash in 2008 many of the most respected financial firms stayed solvent through drug and other criminal proceeds.

It appears that the crash of FTX is exposing another angle in the deep state’s  ongoing operations–where crypto currencies are the tool of choice to fund US backed terror groups. Crypto currencies have also become a favorite of drug cartels, which, according to some journalists, are deeply intertwined with U.S. three-letter agencies, including the CIA. The reason is pretty simple. Crypto allows easy money laundering. Banks keep track of everyone who has an account and where they send their money, allowing law enforcement agencies to track transactions by criminals. Crypto’s like Tether Holdings checks the identity of people who buy coins directly from the company, but once the currency is out in the world, it can be transferred anonymously, just by sending a code. An intelligence agency or drug lord can hold millions of crypto in a digital wallet and send it to a terrorist without anyone knowing.

While mainstream media pored over the details of Bankman-Fried’s gargantuan crypto scam, not one single major outlet has investigated or even acknowledged FTX’s relationship with the government of Ukraine. There has been considerable speculation that the unregulated and unmonitored flow of billions of dollars of US taxpayer provided money through Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government provided a perfect mechanism for large scale money laundering. 

Were client holdings unaccountably and illegally funneled into the West’s proxy war? Or did the supposed aid FTX sent to Kiev find its way into the hands of Ukrainian scammers, corrupt warlords and illicit actors? The corporate media’s failure to explore these questions appears all the more perverse given Bankman-Fried’s flamboyant promotion of his intimate financial relationship with the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Then there’s the fact that in 2022 alone, Bankman-Fried lavished almost $40 million on Democratic candidates, campaigns, and PACs. The giving spree made him the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes, behind liberal venture capitalist George Soros. 

So now, a politically connected crypto-billionaire who used a secret financial “back door” to fleece customers of ungodly sums of money has become the latest character in the saga of shady US aid to Ukraine. And though the collapse of his FTX firm is front page news, mainstream outlets are studiously avoiding the Ukraine angle. How does this scenario sound? Democrats vote to send funds to Ukraine, Ukraine invests in FTX, FTX cryptocurrency was funneled back to the same Democrats. Profit.

If FTX was indeed laundering funds for the proxy war in Ukraine, the slightest indication that regulators were investigating its operations would have triggered alarm bells throughout Washington – and by extension, Kiev. This may be why the Ukrainian government switched the Aid for Ukraine webpage with a dedicated website, and scrubbed the original entirely from the internet just days after the announcement.

The US maintains a textbook deep state, where intelligence, organized crime and finance freely commingle. This dynamic is why the whole Jeffery Epstein saga had to be about a pair of rogue sex fiends rather than a larger story about Epstein and Maxwell’s ties to intelligence. And why, ultimately, the FTX saga will turn out to be nothing more than some 20 year old drug-addled business incompetents who ran a Ponzi scheme.