Were there lowlifes, creeps, perverts, abusers, and criminals in Jeffrey Epstein’s inner circle? You betcha!
Were there actually communist spies in the U.S. government, just like Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.) claimed? You betcha!
In McCarthy’s case, it’s no longer disputed: After the Soviet Union collapsed, the details of the Venona Project were finally made public, proving that — if anything — McCarthy had understated the scope and reach of the Soviet spy network.
From Colorado Politics:
But while conceding McCarthy was unapologetically a demagogue, his tactics deplorable, his accusations frequently off the mark, Harvey Klehr, an expert on the American Communist movement and professor of politics and history at Emory University, argues Russian archives prove the senator was at least partially right about the scope of communist subversion.
“Just because Joe McCarthy was objectionable should not blind us to some things that Sen. McCarthy got right,” Klehr said during a talk Nov. 2 on the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs campus. “There was a very significant issue of national security presented by communist spying and subversion in the United States.”
In the mid-1990s, Klehr, an author of several books on the communist movement in America, said he was the first American and one of the first westerners to forage through a new archive in Russia called the Communist International, which housed millions of records detailing communism around the world, including in America. [emphasis added]
And what Klehr found was shocking:
The records exposed the deep ties between the American Communist Party and Soviet intelligence agencies, Klehr said.
“There was a foreign organization telling a supposedly American political party who its leaders should be, what its policies should be, even the slogans it should use,” Klehr said.
The Soviets were generously funding the American Communist Party, providing subsidies totaling millions of dollars a year. Archival papers detailed a letter from a Soviet Communist Party leader urging Moscow to increase subsidies because of communism’s increasing influence in America, Klehr explained. “The American Communist Party was serving as the agent of a foreign power.” [emphasis added]
But it was more than just financial support: Communist spies had infiltrated the highest reaches of our government, including our most sensitive agencies.
Klehr said decoded communications exposed Soviet spies deep within the American government like Harry Dexter White, a senior U.S. Treasury Department official during the 1930s and the architect of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The successfully unencrypted cables, known as the Venona Project, confirmed allegations against convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were later executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, and Alger Hiss, a public official who worked in the State Department and United Nations convicted of perjury following accusations of being a Soviet spy, Klehr said, adding that virtually every federal agency was touched by Soviet spies.
“There were at least 16 Soviet agents in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency,” Klehr said, listing eight other agencies, including the Justice Department, which were penetrated by Soviet spies.
The Venona Project revealed that 350 Americans worked for Soviet intelligence during World War II, but the communications decoded in the operation were a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands of cables American intelligence officials were unable to crack. And officials were only able to successfully identify about 125 of the 350 Soviet spies working within the American government, Klehr said. [emphasis added]
On a macro-level, McCarthy was exactly right: The communists really did have a deep, sophisticated spying network that imperiled U.S. safety and security. From the atomic bomb to top-secret military plans to the identities of undercover personnel, those traitors endangered the lives of every single American citizen.
But on a micro-level, McCarthy was wrong: He accused the wrong people. He exaggerated his own knowledge, claiming he had an ironclad “list of names.” He overpromised and underdelivered.
And because he got it so wrong on a micro-level, his opponents weaponized his errors to discredit his larger, more relevant point: Communist spies had infiltrated our government — and we needed to do something about it ASAP.
Klehr said while McCarthy was partially right about the larger narrative of Soviet espionage, he did more harm than good.
“The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. I think he remains a demagogue whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult.”
Very few of those accused of spying by McCarthy turned out to later be identified as spies. He was wrong on many details and operated on innuendos disguised as evidence, Klehr said.
He said because McCarthy was often so wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims. [emphasis added]
Today, to quote Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again”: Just like Sen. McCarthy, Congressmen Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) “have a list of names” — only this time, instead of communist sympathizers, collaborators, and spies, it’s the so-called “Epstein List.”
Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna charged Monday that powerful men are being protected by redactions to the Epstein files after viewing the documents in full.
“What I saw that bothered me were the names of at least six men that have been redacted that are likely incriminated by their inclusion in these files,” Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said, adding that “it took some digging to find them.”
But the pair would not reveal the names of the men and only said the six included at least one US citizen, a foreigner, along with “three or four” other individuals whose nationalities they could not immediately determine. Massie said one individual was “pretty high up in a foreign government,” and Khanna said “one of the others is a pretty prominent individual.”
On Feb. 10, Rep. Khanna revealed the first six, as reported by the New York Post:
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on Tuesday publicly revealed the names of the six “wealthy, powerful” men he alleges were “likely incriminated” in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Billionaire businessman Les Wexner and Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Saleem were among those named by the Democratic lawmaker on the House floor — less than 24 hours after he accused the Department of Justice of initially hiding their identities in the latest Epstein document dump.
The four others include Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, and Nicola Caputo.
The six men haven’t been accused of any wrongdoing or charged over their apparent ties to the late convicted pedophile. [emphasis added]
But it doesn’t end with those six, of course. There are many, many more names on the super-secret Epstein List — including President Trump’s.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Axios in an interview Tuesday that when he searched President Trump's name in the unredacted Epstein files the previous day, it came up "more than a million times."
[…]
"To me, this whole rollout of saying that members can come from nine to five to sit at those four computers, is just part of the coverup," Raskin asserted.
Quite naturally, the Epstein sleuths still aren’t satisfied. They’re insisting more names are on the list — despite the protests of the Department of Justice:
The document you cite has numerous victim names. We have just unredacted all non-victim names from this document. The DOJ is committed to transparency. https://t.co/NkM1gBmt7R
— Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) February 10, 2026
Being accused of sex-trafficking and/or pedophilia isn’t a trivial thing. Getting falsely outed as a communist in the 1950s certainly wasn’t desirable; it ended careers and the PR blowback was brutal.
But being falsely outed as a pedophile is so much worse.
It’s catastrophic for Epstein’s victims because — just like McCarthyism — critics will use any false claims to discredit the allegations that are actually true. It’ll become a PR smokescreen that lets the criminals and rapists walk free.
Yet once again, legislators are claiming they “have a list” — and they’re leveraging it to elevate their public profile, land media coverage, grow their brands, and enhance their own careers.
In particular, Ro Khanna has used it to gain MILLIONS of dollars in free media exposure. From NBC:
To Anderson Cooper:
To Erin Burnett:
To MS NOW:
To Kaitlan Collins
To Chris Cuomo:
To Morning Joe:
To Meet the Press:
To Lawrence O’Deonnell:
To Chris Hayes:
To Stephanie Ruhle:
To CBS:
To ABC:
To NBC:
To The Hill:
To podcasts:
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
(Incidentally, Rep. Khanna has been in Congress for nearly a decade. Isn’t it strange how his fixation on Epstein just happened to coincide with Trump’s presidency? What a weird, wacky coincidence.)
This so-called “Epstein list” is the new McCarthyism. Which means Ro Khanna is the new Joe McCarthy.
Unfortunately, the Venona Project didn’t come to light ‘til 1995. By that time, Joe McCarthy had been dead for nearly 40 years — and it was too late to do anything about all those communist spies. McCarthy’s over-the-top public posturing, exaggerated claims, and “I have a list” façade gave the Soviet spies free rein to obscure the truth.
If we’re not careful, history will repeat itself.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First: It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battlelines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
We need your help to succeed!
As a PJ Media VIP member, you’ll receive exclusive access to our behind-the-paywall content, commentating privileges, and an ad-free experience. VIP Gold gets you the same level of “insider access” across our entire family of sites (PJ Media, Townhall, RedState, twitchy, Hot Air, and Bearing Arms). That means: More stories, more videos, more content, more fun, more conservatism, more EVERYTHING!
And if you CLICK HERE and use the promo code FIGHT you’ll receive a Trumpian 60% discount!
Thank you for your consideration.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member