Twenty minutes later, after what ever business has been transacted or particular confidences, shared I am asked back in.
“Why?” I asked Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do some many people keep coming back here, everything considered.”
“Why we camp out here? I find that question as mysterious as you do,” says Weingarten.
Shortly after Weingarten leaves, Epstein tells me that Eric Holder will resign by the end of the week—which he does.
Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-room. It’s a young man named Brook Pierce, a former child actor, and dotcom high flyer—a principle in a gaming company called DEN, a notorious dotcom burnout, with its own sex scandal—who is now a leading investor in Bitcoin. He describe himself as the “the most active investor in the field.”
And, indeed, is the first clear explanation I actually get about Bitcoin. It is so good that Epstein stops him and checks to see if his next appointment is here. And seconds later, Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and President of Harvard, enters the dining room. Summers, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Shakes chocolates, focuses in on the Bitcoin investor.
“Okay,” he says, after listening for a bit, “I have opportunities here. But an additional feature of my decision problem roughly speaking is that the worst that could happen to you is that you could lose all the money you put into it. Whereas, I could go—I mean I don’t look that great now—but I could go from being seen as a figure of some probity and some intelligence to being a figure of much less intelligence and much less probity...”
“Well,” says Pierce in what in some dramatic understatement, “you are going to have some low quality characters playing the space...”
That evening, there is a small cocktail party, which includes the former Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and Thorbj@rn Jaglandthe head of the Noble Peace Prize Committee, who offers an affable, but general scathing, critique of U.S. diplomacy (and a brief defense of Obama’s Peace Prize award) and to whom Epstein offers a ride back to Europe on his jet.
The next morning, it’s Ehud Barack, the former Israeli Prime Minister and Israel, for breakfast. Barack is, over his omelet, able to defend both Obama and Putin. Then Kathy Ruemmler, who has just left her job as White House Counsel joins. She is already in the mix as a possible next attorney general, but, in fact, will withdraw from consideration in part to work with Epstein.
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