Nick Bryant is a skilled investigative reporter who, in 2009, published a book about a child sex trafficking network in Omaha, Nebraska involving powerful GOP politicians who were flying children to a party house on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., which was wired for blackmail.[1]
In 2011, as he continued his investigations into the dark underbelly of U.S. politics, Bryant obtained Jeffrey Epstein’s black book from one of the Epstein victims’ lawyers and then obtained flight logs from Epstein’s “Lolita Express,” which he published on Gawker in 2015.
Today, Bryant is heading a new non-profit organization, Epstein Justice, that is trying to mobilize public support for the establishment of a congressional commission that could help uncover the full extent of the Epstein sex-trafficking network extending to the powerful political figures and shadowy intelligence operatives who oversaw it.
Epstein Justice has on its advisory board celebrities like Roseanne Barr, clinical psychologists who have worked with sexual abuse victims and published pathbreaking articles about trauma, Dr. Lois Lee, who established the first program to help teen prostitutes in Hollywood, and two Epstein sex-trafficking survivors, Teresa Helm and Ashley Rubright.
Epstein Justice specifies on its website that the documents being publicly released are “thoroughly laced with redactions” and that the Justice Department and FBI have erroneously asserted that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had “no co-conspirators.”
In reality, we know that Epstein and Maxwell had intelligence ties and oversaw a honey-pot operation designed to blackmail and entrap powerful politicians, as well as media and academic influencers and other celebrities with the aim of shaping public policy.
The CIA has a long history of running honey-pot operations, of which the scandal Bryant helped expose in Nebraska—the Franklin scandal—was one example.[2]
During the early Cold War, the CIA operated sexual blackmail rings in San Francisco and New York City employing prostitutes (probably many of them underage) to target foreign diplomats in what The Washington Post nicknamed the CIA’s “love traps.”
Jack Anderson and Les Whitten wrote in a 1975 Post column that, “through hidden one-way mirrors, CIA agents filmed the sexual adventures and later tried to blackmail the victims into becoming informants.”
In the same period, Lyndon B. Johnson set up a sex club in Washington under the direction of mob-linked aide Bobby Baker to blackmail and entrap Johnson’s Senate colleagues, enabling Johnson to become “Master of the Senate.”
On February 25, CovertAction Magazine sat down with Nick Bryant to discuss his work. He started by stating that he had a difficult childhood growing up in Minneapolis and ran away at age 12, even though he was a good student and athlete, to get away from a violent stepfather.
After graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, Bryant started writing academic papers and a book about how the U.S. health-care system shortchanged children of lower socio-economic status. At the time, he was employed as a bio-medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota.
Deciding in the 1990s to pursue a journalism career in New York City, Bryant published articles on dark topics that seemed to capture public interest, like serial killers, the Hell’s Angels and Satanism.
For one story, he helped expose a child pornography and abuse network operating out of Tallahassee, Florida, and Washington, D.C., called “The Finders.”
As he progressed with the story and wrote to law enforcement officials for an update, Bryant was told that “The Finders” had “become a CIA matter” and that there was not going to be any further investigation.[3]
This raised serious red flags for Bryant and alerted him to the fact that the CIA was protecting child sex offenders and, perhaps, working directly with them.
Bryant told CAM that, when researching child sex-abuse in Nebraska and potential links to the CIA, he came to feel like a reporter who was trying to “expose the KGB in Stalinist Russia.” People were “terrified to talk.” Two grand juries claimed that no children were being abused when sealed documents Bryant obtained showed a list of 60 victims.
There were also numerous strange deaths associated with the Franklin scandal, including the plane crash of private investigator Gary Caradori in July 1990, and the “boating accident” of former CIA Director William Colby, who was hired by the Nebraska legislature to investigate the Caradori plane crash (which also killed Caradori’s eight-year old son) and child-sex abuse.[4]
Bryant said that, after he finished his book on the Franklin scandal, he could not find a publisher even though he had good connections in the media and publishing worlds. Eventually, his book was published by Trine Day, a small outfit in Oregon run by Robert “Kris” Milligan, the son of a former CIA operative, though the book neither sold well nor triggered any new investigations, as Bryant had hoped.
Bryant said that he nevertheless persisted in his research into child sex-trafficking networks, which led him to the Epstein case.
Like in the Franklin case, a grand jury in Florida concluded that Epstein had not molested any underage girls, which we know to be untrue.
After gaining access to Epstein’s black book, Bryant got in touch with some of the victims who had been flown to Epstein’s private island. Again, though, he had trouble publishing any of his stories—except in 2015 with Gawker. Bryant said he thought that the publication of the black book would have had a big public impact, but nothing happened afterward.
The Epstein story became better known after Epstein’s arrest in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell’s June 2022 trial, which, Bryant said, was a “travesty of justice” since Maxwell was charged and convicted on only one sex-trafficking charge.
At the time, Bryant organized protests outside the courtroom, which set the groundwork for Epstein Justice.
Bryant said that a main purpose of Epstein Justice is to “prevent miscarriages of justice from happening over and over again” and to lobby for a congressional commission, which “seems to be the only way that the full truth could come out and that the victims could get any justice.”
Bryant said that, for the commission to be established, it would not require a presidential signature, just support from the majority of House and Senate members. Besides trying to raise public awareness, the Epstein network is, thus, focusing its efforts on lobbying Congress.
Bryant said that, with release of the new Epstein files, Epstein Justice has “the wind at its back,” and is pushing for something most of the public wants. The congressional commission would “uncover Epstein’s co-conspirators, recruiters and procurers,” and show that the claim being made that it was “just Epstein and Maxwell” is “absurd.”
Besides the horrifying cost for victims, the Epstein matter is of pressing concern to the public because it gets to the heart of how policy has been hijacked by intelligence agencies acting at the behest of plutocratic elites who bully and manipulate people to get their way.
Bryant cited the remarks of Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett (R), who said in December 2023 that “my colleagues are in honey traps.”[5] By implication, these colleagues are supporting legislation they have been blackmailed into, and opposing legislation favorable to the public interest for the same reason.
According to Burchett, congressional members “may be on a trip or at a bar, meet someone and buy them a drink. Next thing you know, you’re in a hotel room with them, naked. Next thing you know, you’re about to make a key vote, and what happens? Some well-dressed person comes up and whispers into your ear, ‘Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you. Were you in a motel room on whatever with whoever?’ And then you’re, like, ‘Uh-oh.’ And they say, ‘You really ought not be voting for this thing.’ They know what to get at. If it’s women, drugs, booze—it’ll find you in D.C. And other elected offices.”
A key figure in the cover-up of both the Franklin and Epstein scandals, Bryant said, is William Barr, who served as Attorney General under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Barr is known to have an intelligence background[6] along with his father, Donald Barr, who happened to have been the headmaster at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan in 1975 when young Epstein taught mathematics there—without a college degree.
Among other things, a congressional commission could investigate Barr’s role in the cover-up and the CIA’s penetration of the U.S. Executive Branch.
It could also address Epstein’s ties with Les Wexner, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, who had an intelligence and Mafia background, and helped run a CIA proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport (SAT), used for drug trafficking in the Iran-Contra affair in which Epstein may have also been involved.
By uncovering the truth behind the Epstein sex-trafficking network, the congressional commission that Bryant is working to establish could generally help expose much larger criminal operations involving the CIA dating back to the 1980s, and function as a new kind of Church Committee, which is urgently needed.
See Nick Bryant, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009). Bryant is also the author of an important book exposing the CIA’s role in Watergate that CovertAction Magazine reviewed here. ↑
In the 1980s, Craig Spence, a conservative lobbyist who boasted about working for the CIA, pimped out children to the power elite in Washington in apartments that were bugged with video and audio recording equipment. Spence later died under mysterious circumstances like Epstein. For the connection between the Epstein-Maxwell honey-pot and past honey-pot operations, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “While Guilty for Sex Trafficking, Ghislaine Maxwell Takes Fall for Alleged Sexual Blackmail Operation Run by Western Intelligence Agencies,” CovertAction Magazine, July 14, 2022; and Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein, vol. 1 (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2022). Webb discusses how longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’ s lawyer and Donald Trump’s mentor, ran sexual blackmail operations targeting politicians with minors, a practice long adopted by organized crime. Because Hoover was photographed in a compromised sexual position with his aide Clyde Tolson, the FBI did not go after organized crime, ensuring that organized crime grew stronger through his tenure as FBI Director from the mid 1920s through the mid 1970s.Two leaders of “The Finders” sex-trafficking network, Douglas Ammerman and James Michael Holwell, were arrested in February 1987 in Tallahassee after witnesses reported seeing them in Myers Park with six scruffy, hungry children between the ages of 2 and 11. Six weeks later, after an investigation that went all the way to D.C., the men were released from custody. The state dropped charges against the men in March. ↑
Bryant, The Franklin Scandal; John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska (Lincoln, NE: AWT Inc., 2011). Colby had expressed private misgivings about the CIA’s use of children in sexual blackmail schemes prior to his death in May 1996. For more on his supicious death, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Who Wacked CIA Spy Chief William Colby?” CovertAction Magazine, April 27, 2022. ↑
Burchett said in a right-wing podcast in December 2023, as was reported in HuffPost: “The old honey pot. The Russians do that. And I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up. Why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing out of Congress?” Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) had previously alleged that he had witnessed anti-drug addiction leaders doing cocaine and that he had been invited by colleagues to orgies in Washington. Cawthorn’s claims were widely derided, he was accused unjustly of various crimes, and he lost his primary election in 2022. ↑
See Terry Reed and John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA (New York: S.P.I. Book, 1994); Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, 207. Barr officially worked for the CIA from 1973 to 1977. In 1978, he joined the Washington-based law firm, Shaw, Pittman, Pott & Trowbridge, which had a history of providing criminal defense for intelligence agents. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
