In light of Congress wanting to interview Bill Barr- It seems a good time to recall a bit of Epstein/ Barr family history. Jeffrey Epstein a high school drop out teaching at Dalton, a posh private school then skipping over to Bear Sterns, before it collapsed and was subsequently sold to J.P. Morgan – a bank that stays connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
Right place, right time
On March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns, the 85-year-old investment bank, narrowly avoids bankruptcy by its sale to J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. at the shockingly low price of $2 per share.
Bear Stearns seemed to be riding high with a stock market capitalization of $20 billion in early 2007. But its increasing involvement in the hedge-fund business, particularly with risky mortgage-backed securities, paved the way for it to become one of the earliest casualties of the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the Great Recession.
Bear Stearns collapses
For the fourth quarter of 2007, Bear recorded a loss for the first time in some 80 years, and CEO James Cayne was forced to step down; Alan Schwartz replaced him in January 2008.
Barely two months later, the collapse of Bear Stearns unfolded swiftly over the course of a few days. It began on Tuesday, March 11, when the Federal Reserve announced a $50 billion lending facility to help struggling financial institutions. That same day, the rating agency Moody’s downgraded many of Bear’s mortgage-backed securities to B and C levels (or “junk bonds”).
Unlike a regular bank, which can use cash from depositors to fund its operations, an investment bank like Bear Stearns often relied on short-term (even overnight) funding deals known as repurchase agreements, or “repos.”
Congress Wants to Talk with William( Bill) Barr
Bill Barr’s father Donald Barr managed to get Jeffrey Epstein, at that time a 20/21 year old high school drop out, a job teaching math and physics at the very prestigious, exclusive Dalton school. As coincidence or providence would have it Jeffrey Epstein went from Dalton School to Bear Sterns. Good for Epstein, not so good for Bear Sterns
Now, Barr is scheduled to appear on Monday on Capitol Hill, where he will be questioned behind closed doors by members of Congress conducting a review of the Epstein matter.
Sources familiar with the oversight committee’s plans tell CBS News they will be asking questions about Barr’s involvement in the death investigation.
CBS News has reached out to Barr for comment.
Barr, a veteran of the George H.W. Bush administration who was serving his second stint as head of the Justice Department under President Trump at the time, said he was “appalled” when Epstein was found dead on Aug. 10, 2019, in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Epstein was being held at the now temporarily shuttered federal detention center after being arrested on sex trafficking charges that could have carried a life sentence. His arrest came after years of questions surrounding an earlier controversial prosecutorial deal in Florida where he pleaded to state prostitution charges and a federal felony case was dropped.
Scrutiny around that deal, and his subsequent death, has fueled years of suspicions and conspiracy theories. The furor also has enveloped Epstein’s vast network of powerful former friends, including Mr. Trump and former President Clinton, who have disavowed him and have not been accused of wrongdoing.
Campaign promises to “declassify” files related to Epstein, made by Mr. Trump and his surrogates in 2024, have led to months of political headaches for the White House.
The release last month of what the Justice Department called “raw” surveillance video from near Epstein’s cell block, rather than settling questions about the night he died, raised new ones. The analysis by CBS News flagged multiple inconsistencies between the video and the 2023 report released by the Justice Department’s Inspector General on Epstein’s death.
2019
Epstein, who was charged last week by federal authorities in the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking with sex-trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex-trafficking, was a 20 year old college drop-out when he was hired to teach at Dalton—possibly by the school’s headmaster Donald Barr in the mid 1970s. Donald Barr was the father of current United States Attorney General William Barr, who is currently overseeing Epstein’s prosecution.
The joke has been [that] this is the Epstein-Barr problem at Dalton, said Harry Segal, a 1974 graduate who is now a senior lecturer at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical College, in an interview with the Huffington Post. Epstein-Barr is a type of herpes virus best known as the cause of infectious mononucleosis.
Scott Spizer, who graduated in 1976, said that Epstein was most remembered for his “persistent attention” on teenage girls in the hallways, recalled a night when the young educator showed up at a party where Dalton students were drinking.
“I can remember thinking at the time, ‘This is wrong,'” Spizer said in an interview with the New York Times.
“It was weird,” said Paul Grossman, a 1978 Dalton graduate who remembered students talking about Epstein’s attendance at the party in school. “Everyone talked about it,” he said to the Times.
Peter Branch, who took over as headmaster after Donald Barr, said that he could not recall anything untoward about Epstein’s conduct with students, telling the Times he was terminated simply because “he was a young teacher who didn’t come up to snuff. So, ultimately, he was asked to leave.”
Epstein eventually landed at the now-defunct investment firm Bear Stearns.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-did-jeffrey-epstein-make-his-money
But the stint at Dalton had him tutoring the son of Bear Stearns CEO Alan Greenberg, which led to a job at the investment bank before it collapsed in 2008 following the housing crash. Epstein then became a money manager for billionaires including Les Wexner, founder and CEO of L Brands, and Apollo Global Management Chairman Leon Black. Black paid Epstein $158 million for tax and estate planning services, according to the Senate Finance Committee.
Alex Acosta is going to be questioned as well
He fell on the knife to keep the Epstein scandal quiet during the first Trump term- That’s how it seemed to me at the time.