Month: June 2023

Authored by Louise Chambers via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Ireland is offering to pay up to $92,000 for people to live on its 30 remote, idyllic islands off the western coast in an attempt to revitalize the islands that have rolling green hills, emerald seas, and moody skies as a realistic option for long-term living.

“Our Living Islands” is a 10-year policy fronted by the Irish Minister for Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys. She said in a June statement that the “ambitious” policy “will have a real and transformative effect on our islands and improve the lives of the people and families living there.”

The 10-year policy includes a three-year action plan comprising 80 “commitments” to improve housing and water infrastructure, health and education services, roads and piers, outdoor amenities, and sustainable tourism, as well as introducing high-speed broadband internet and remote working hubs to make working life easier for island residents.

A government grant will also go toward turning empty and derelict buildings into long-term homes.

To cap off this immense island regeneration, Ireland offers cash grants of up to €84,000 (approx. US $92,000) to anyone who buys property on one of the islands after July 1. The catch is that the property must have been built before 1993, and must have been vacant for at least two years, Business Insider reported.

Additionally, the grant money can only be used toward structural improvements, insulation, and redecoration.

The islands are cut off daily by shifting tides and are not connected to the mainland by bridges or causeways. Each small island already has a loyal, permanent population of hundreds. The 10-year policy is aimed at retaining these residents, enticing new residents, and encouraging tourists to enjoy the unique culture, heritage, and biodiversity that the islands have to offer.

“Our coastal islands and their communities are an integral part of the fabric of rural Ireland,” the Department for Rural and Community Development said.

Humphreys believes that in launching the “Our Living Islands” policy “we will see more people living on the islands and more people working on our islands, with good career prospects, regardless of where their employer is headquartered.”

“We will see our island communities, and especially young people, having an active role in shaping the future for their own islands,” Humphreys said.

On June 13, Humphreys approved capital funding of €1.9 million (approx. US$2.07 million) from five local authorities to start work on major infrastructure on the islands, such as piers, roads, and playgrounds, according to a statement.

However, this is not the first time these unique Irish islands have appealed to new residents. In 2019, people living on Inishmore, formerly Árainn Mhór, meaning “kidney-shaped,” sent open letters to the United States and Australia asking people to consider moving to their beautiful remote home to enjoy “time for living,” CNN reported.

“We’ve a whole host of multi-talented people here, ready to collaborate,” read the open letter. “Or if you’re looking for a change of pace, why not come here. Your commute, no matter where you are, will only ever be five minutes.”

Just after the weekend of chaos in southern Russia due to the short-lived Wagner march on Moscow, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, mused before reporters in Lithuania: “I think what we’re seeing in Russia over the last days demonstrates the fragility of the [Russian] regime, and, of course, it is a demonstration of weakness.” He further claimed, “We see the weakness of the Russian regime and it also demonstrates how difficult and dangerous it is for President Putin.”

In follow-up, on Wednesday Stoltenberg and other NATO officials commented on the presence of Wagner Group in Belarus, following its founder and chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, having landed in Minsk in his private jet on Tuesday. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had teased the possibility of Wagner Group being activated inside his territory, in support of Belarusian armed forces. 

Both Stoltenberg and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda have responded to these reports, expressing alarm over “instability” in the region, and threat of attacks from mercenaries. 

“If Wagner deploys its serial killers in Belarus, all neighboring countries face even bigger danger of instability,” the Lithuanian president said. 

Stoltenberg agreed there’s reason to be alarmed, though he said it’s “too early” to say what Wagner in Belarus could mean for NATO, but reaffirmed the alliance will protect “every ally, every inch of NATO territory” against threats from either “Moscow or Minsk.”

“We have already increased our military presence in the eastern part of the alliance and we will make further decisions to further strengthen our collective defense with more high-readiness forces and more capabilities at the upcoming summit,” Stoltenberg said.

The major NATO summit, where Sweden’s potential membership will also be high on the agenda, is set to be hosted in Vilnius July 11-12. Germany has meanwhile committed 4,000 more troops to be stationed in Lithuania as part of a combined force.

Polish President Andrzej Duda has expressed that Wagner in Belarus should be a discussion point regarding security on NATO’s eastern flank. “This is really serious and very concerning, and we have to make very strong decisions. It requires a very, very tough answer of NATO,” Duda said.

Apparently, Lukashenko and Prigozhin have the ‘warmest relationship’ going back years.
This clip is from Lukashenko’s interview to Gordon recorded in 2020. #Lukashenko #Belarus #Russia #Wagner #Prigozhin pic.twitter.com/b5CtOtbDmt

— Natalka (@NatalkaKyiv) June 28, 2023

Russia’s President Putin in a series of public statements this week confirmed that a deal had been made with Wagner and its now exiled leader: Wagner fighters now have the option of signing a contract with the defense ministry, or “they can go to Belarus,” in the president’s words.

Via The Cradle,

The Swedish government gave approval to organizers of a Quran-burning demonstration outside of a mosque in Stockholm on June 28.

The decision is expected to draw the ire of Turkey and hinder the Nordic country’s potential NATO membership, as has happened previously.

NATO officials are looking to admit Stockholm into the US-led alliance during the Vilnius Summit in Lithuania next month. Officials have previously clarified that not resolving Sweden’s admission by July would send a dangerous and humiliating message to the security alliance’s enemies.

Ever since Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, Sweden and Finland have sought to join NATO as a defense mechanism in the event that the war in Ukraine was to hypothetically expand into Europe.

Acquiring membership would require a unanimous vote from NATO’s members, but Turkiye and Hungary have voted against the Nordic country’s application.

Ankara has accused Helsinki and Stockholm of harboring members and supporters of the PKK and its Syrian offshoot, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey deems as terror organizations.

At the end of March, Turkey granted Finland eligibility to join NATO. Sweden’s admission is still pending.

Despite high expectations for Stockholm in relation to the upcoming summit in July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently shot down the prospects of Sweden joining NATO over Stockholm’s failure to uphold several of Ankara’s requirements for joining the security alliance, such as recently permitted supporters of the PKK to demonstrate on the streets of its capital.

Turkey has previously condemned the Swedish authorities for allowing a far-right anti-immigrant group to burn several Qurans outside of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm earlier this year, which resulted in Ankara stalling its decision to permit the country into NATO. 

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described the act of burning the Quran as “extremely serious” and an attempt to sabotage the nation’s NATO application. 

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has claimed that multiple senior government officials—including Pentagon employees with “high clearances”—are aware of a secret UFO craft crash retrieval program being run by the United States.

The Republican lawmaker made the claims in an interview with NewsNation on June 26, shortly after Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer David Grusch alleged that the Pentagon had discovered dead alien bodies from spacecraft that had crashed.

“There are people that have come forward to share information with our committee over the last couple of years … I want to be very protective of these people,” said Rubio, who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“A lot of these people came to us even before protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward,” Rubio said, adding that many of those claimed to have “first-hand knowledge” of the alleged extraterrestrial retrieval program.

The Florida Republican alleged that some of the whistleblowers who have stepped forward with similar claims to Grusch are public figures with “high clearances” and “high positions within our government.”

“We’re trying to gather as much of that information as we can … Some of these people still work in the government. And frankly, a lot of them are very fearful of their jobs, fearful [of] their clearances, fearful of their career, and some, frankly, are fearful of harm coming to them,” Rubio said.

Rubio’s comments come amid an ongoing investigation—led by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.)—into the alleged the secret military UFO program. The committee is expected to hold a hearing on the matter soon.

Government Recovering Remains of ‘Nonhuman Origin’

That probe was launched shortly after Grusch made his claims regarding alleged extraterrestrial discoveries earlier this month in an interview with NewsNation.

Grusch previously worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office and was a member of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force from 2019 to 2021.

In the interview, the senior official claimed to have provided Congress and the Intelligence Community inspector general with classified information about secret UAP programs which he said proves that the government has been recovering partial and intact remains of aircraft of nonhuman origin, as well as their occupants, for decades.

“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch said. “Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots, and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true.”

Grusch stated that he believed it was “totally nuts” after first learning of the alleged program but claimed that over the years, many current and former senior officers had provided him with evidence of the program, including documents.

Pentagon Denies UFO Program Claims

Despite his claims, Grusch has not yet been able to present any solid evidence.

At the time, the Pentagon denied Grusch’s claims, with the Defense Department stating that officials had “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Asked whether he believes Grusch’s and others’ claims to be genuine, Rubio told NewsNation that he doesn’t find them to be “not credible or credible” because they are simply “beyond the realm of what any of us have ever dealt with.”

“What I think we owe is just a mature, you know, understanding, listening and trying to put all these pieces together and just sort of intake the information without any prejudgment or jumping to any conclusions,” Rubio said.

The Republican’s comments come after the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a bill that would pause funding for any government activities involving “unidentified anomalous phenomena” that have not been “formally, officially, explicitly, and specifically described, explained, and justified to the appropriate committees of Congress” or congressional leadership.

The legislation also states that funding will not be given for such government activities when they involve recovering “unidentified anomalous phenomena craft or pieces and components of such craft.”

Additionally, the bill instructs individuals currently or formerly under contract with the federal government with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information to Congress and notes that they will not be subject to a criminal or civil action for doing so.

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

Richard Koo has become an unexpected celebrity in China these days. All of a sudden, the work of the economist who coined the phrase “balance-sheet recession” to describe the root cause of Japan’s lost decade is highly relevant to what’s happening in China.

What the Nomura Research Institute economist sees isn’t encouraging: It may take Chinese companies and households many years to cut down debt and restore financial health in a “very painful process.”

The concept of a balance-sheet recession, which Koo came up with in the 1990s, is simple. After asset markets turn from boom to bust, households and companies need to save to pay down debt. When they do it at the same time, no one spends, which sucks the oxygen out of the economy. In response, the government should step in as the borrower and spender of last resort.

This week, Koo offered his diagnosis on China. In a speech that went viral on social media, he made a few comparisons between China and Japan’s situation three decades ago. He concluded that the fate of Japanification is highly likely. (The transcript of his speech hasn’t been independently verified, but the view is consistent with his recent interview on CNBC.)

Richard Koo has been one of my favorite macro thinkers. I have always believed that his thoery on balance sheet recession will prove to be extremely relevant for China one day. Yesterday he gave an extraordinary speech on China’s Japanification risk, below are the main takeaways:

— Shanghai Macro Strategist (@ShanghaiMacro) June 28, 2023

He noted that both countries experienced a similar housing boom. Once the bubble bursts, the balance-sheet recession starts. The good news, in his view, is that policymakers in Beijing were aware of the issue early on, which makes it likely they will respond to it more quickly than Japan did.

The bad news is that China faces a bigger challenge than Japan did three decades ago. For starters, China’s economy is more reliant on the construction industry. At 26% of GDP, the size of the sectors are comparable in both countries. But the strength of other Japanese industries, such as auto and tech, softened the blow. Unfortunately, China doesn’t have similar industries that could fill in the void left by the housing slump.

What’s particularly puzzling to Koo is that China’s deleveraging seemed to have started well before the housing bust in 2020. Corporations have stopped borrowing at times since 2015, suggesting something else has sapped the animal spirits of the private sector. (The timing coincided with the government’s supply-side reform that targeted eradicating overproduction capacities in various industries.)

Also, China is facing greater geopolitical risks. While Japan also had economic frictions with the US in the 1990s, the conflict was limited to the trade sector. In China’s case, a full-blown decoupling with the West would mean the nation could only export to poorer economies that make up just 27% of global GDP, which would hold down its growth.

What makes it even trickier is that China’s population started to shrink at the same time that the housing industry went from boom to bust. In Japan, the population started to decline nearly two decades after the bubble burst. Throw in regulatory uncertainties and lack of subsidies during the pandemic, and Beijing has a bigger problem on its hands.

What should Beijing do? Don’t waste time on monetary policies, or structural reforms. Instead, focus all energy on fiscal stimulus to keep the economy going, Koo advised. Meanwhile, complete all the unfinished housing projects “at any cost” to avoid a collapse.

To end the speech, he said: “I hope Chinese policymakers understand and respond to these challenges, because this might be the last chance for China to reach the living standards of the First World.”

Coming from the man who arguably understands the subject more than anyone else, this is quite a warning to policymakers in Beijing.

On Tuesday, President Biden declared the US economy is “strong” and expects no recession. However, in contrast to his forecast, one barometer of middle-class spending habits is flashing red. 

The Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index, which tracks prices for the 50 most-traded watches by value on the secondary market, continues falling from record highs reached in April 2022. Prices are below July 2021 levels, approaching the lowest point in two years. 

“Demand for pricey timepieces from the top Swiss brands has cooled amid slowing economies, higher interest rates, and the crash in cryptocurrencies,” according to Bloomberg. 

Watch buying activity can be used as a barometer of middle-income spending habits. If consumers have more money, they will increase purchases of discretionary items like wristwatches. We have also pointed out that diamond prices have plunged. 

We also noted in late May that LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton warned about a slowdown in US growth. At the time, we asked: Did The Luxury Bubble Just Burst?

So contrary to the president’s claims about a strong economy, mid-tier consumers are dialing back spending on luxury goods. 

Goldman’s Rich Privorosky recently pointed out, “Something is not quite adding up on the consumer” and asked, “Have we just run out of excess savings and are we returning to replenishing savings?”

So putting all this together, consumers continue to shun secondary watch markets, pull back on diamond spending, and reduce Gucci handbag purchases. This comes as many consumers have racked up high amounts of credit card debt while paying some of the highest interest rates in decades, depleted savings, and endured two years of negative real wage growth due to the inflation storm. 

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

Sources close to former President Trump say he has a plan for keeping Congress from ever again forcing him into “disgraceful” and “ridiculous” spending situations. If he returns to the White House, Trump will seek to resurrect authority that Congress stripped from the presidency almost a half century ago. 

What President Nixon squandered, his campaign promises, Trump will restore, namely the impoundment power. “A lot of you,” the former president told a New Hampshire crowd Thursday, “don’t know what that is.” Indeed, few now remember it. 

Impoundment, if restored, would allow a president, in theory, to simply refuse to spend appropriations by Congress. More than just an avenue to cut spending, Trump sees that kind of authority as key to starving, and thus crushing, the so-called “deep state.” 

But such a move would fundamentally alter the balance of power, and any effort to restore the long-forgotten authority virtually guarantees a protracted legal battle over who exactly controls the power of the purse. Trump welcomes that fight. Some budget experts believe he won’t get anywhere.

Regardless, advisors close to the former president tell RealClearPolitics they are drawing up plans to challenge the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in court, and if that fails, to lean on the legislature to repeal it. The latter would require passing a law to surrender power, something lawmakers are loath to do. 

Congress already went to war with another president who had expansive views of his own authority. And Congress won. 

Inflation in the 1970s, the Nixon White House complained, was the result of a profligate “Credit Card Congress.” The California Republican warned Capitol Hill not to spend in excess of $250 billion. When his warning was ignored, Nixon simply refused to spend the appropriated money. A rebuke from the Supreme Court followed when the president impounded funding for environmental projects. But weakened by Watergate, Nixon eventually signed legislation effectively surrendering a power that had been exercised from the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson to Lyndon B. Johnson. 

Russ Vought, Trump’s last director of the Office of Management and Budget, calls the concession of impoundment power “the original sin” that ensured “the executive branch no longer plays a meaningful role” in the appropriations process. Vought told RCP in an interview that the power of the purse has become “caricature,” where rather than “setting ceilings,” Congress now sets “spending floors.” 

Hence, Trump’s “unhappy” signature on multiple multi trillion-dollar spending bills. 

Trump promised he would “never sign another bill like this again” before putting his signature on a “crazy” $1.3 trillion spending bill in 2018. Two years later, he signed another omnibus bill, this one worth $1.4 trillion, that he called “disgraceful.” Both times, Trump justified voting for the bloated bills conservatives loathed by pointing to increased military spending. 

Restoring impoundment authority, thus giving presidents an option to curb spending beyond just the veto, current Trump campaign and former Trump administration officials tell RCP that was part of the plan for a second term that never came. 

The former president said he believes the 1974 law that gutted impoundment is unconstitutional, and if returned to the White House, would govern accordingly. 

“Yes, there’s the effort to have it overturned in courts. Yes, there is the legislative effort, but when you think that a law is unconstitutional,” Vought told RCP, the administration ought to look “to do the bare minimum of what the courts have required,” and “to push the envelope.” 

Trump did something like this, exercising what Vought called “impoundment-like authorities,” when he froze nearly $400 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, even though the funds were congressionally appropriated. The Government Accountability Office later said that in doing so, Trump violated the law. He was impeached by the House over a phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky concerning the money. 

Trump’s OMB disputed the GAO ruling at the time, saying the administration was simply its apportionment authority to spend the money according to the most efficient timetable. 

“The reason why there wasn’t an impoundment was because we did not have the authority just to pocket the money and not spend it,” Vought recalled, saying that if a new paradigm was in place, the administration “potentially would have had the ability to go further and pocket the money.” 

Trump believes impoundment would be “a crucial tool” in his fight with the administrative state. “Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State, Drain the Swamp, and starve the Warmongers,” he said in campaign video first obtained and reported by Semafor. “We can simply choke off the money.”

His campaign pointed RCP to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security, an entity that House Republicans allege has been involved in censorship of Americans, as a prime example of where dollars could be impounded. 

But even some conservatives have their doubts. Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that when it comes to cutting spending appropriated money after the fact, there “is a limited amount of wiggle room.” 

“The idea that a president is going to achieve any sort of significant savings or reduction in the size of the administrative state by exercising impoundment authorities is patently ludicrous,” Kosar told RCP. 

The policy wonk agrees that the reform Nixon signed into law, mandating a complex and cumbersome budgeting process, seldom works. But without repealing and replacing that law, he said,  “a president flat out refusing to spend money that was clearly appropriated for a particular purpose, saying he just doesn’t want to do it, pretty much would be grounds for impeachment.”

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration, agrees that the current budget process “has become so dysfunctional that it is very ripe for reforms.”

Now a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she points to the partisan gridlock and numerous government shutdowns that are a feature of the current process. “The number of shutdowns in the entirety of U.S. history before 1974,” Bilmes said in an interview with RCP, “was zero.”

Congress has been kicking around ideas for some time on how to reform the way they spend taxpayer money. Lawmakers consistently fail to pass individual appropriation bills, opting instead to approve spending all at once with a single bill, usually at the end of year and the last minute.

Even if the process is reformed, however, Bilmes said that “the basic premise of the law, which is that the Constitution provides Congress with the ultimate authority, is very unlikely to change.”

She added that although she disagrees with the idea that reducing the national debt requires gutting the Impoundment Act, there is a recent precedent for taming runaway spending. Bilmes pointed  RCP to the agreements hammered out between Bill Clinton and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. That is possible again. In theory.

Earth’s surface is covered by 71% water, connecting every corner of the world, so it’s no surprise that 80% of global trade is carried by ship. But how does it all work?

This is part one of Visual Capitalist’s The Shipping Industry: Plotting a Course for the Future, a two-part series for their sponsor Seaspan Corporation about the current state and future of global maritime trade.

A Bird’s Eye View of Shipping

The shipping industry provides low-cost transportation options for a wide variety of goods and products, from raw materials to finished consumer products. Briefly, the process goes something like this:

1. Order received at overseas factory

2. Order placed in 20-foot container and transported to port

3. Cargo loaded onto a ship

4. Cargo crosses the ocean

5. Cargo arrives at destination

6. Cargo is offloaded

7. Cargo clears customs and makes its way to the customer

In 2022, nearly 11 billion tons of goods took a similar journey, according to data collected by the United Nations in their annual Review of Maritime Transport.

Now that we have some idea of how the process works, let’s take a closer look at some of the pieces that keep world trade flowing, starting with the global shipping fleet.

From Tanker to Titan

The first thing to know about the fleet is that it’s big. In 2022, it numbered 102,899 ships over 100 gross tons, including tankers, bulk transports, and containerships. And it’s growing, and not just in sheer numbers. 

Containerships in particular have been steadily growing in size since a converted WWII T2 tanker made history in 1956 by strapping 58 containers to its deck, as ship owners chased greater economies of scale. Today’s containerships can carry upwards of 20,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). 

Too Many Ships, Not Enough Cargo?

Ship-breaking on the other hand, the process of disassembling ships for parts and raw materials, has stalled. 

Over 2021 and the first three quarters of 2022, the number of containership breakdowns plummeted. With more newbuilds on the way and the World Trade Organization revising global trade growth projections downwards, there might not be enough containers to go around.

Port Volumes Are Up, but So Is Performance

And that could be good news for shipping prices, which hit record highs during the supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

At the beginning of 2022, the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, which tracks ocean freight charges on a collection of routes, hit a record 5109.6, nearly five times the pre-pandemic average. 

Prices have since returned to Earth, as ports worked to clear their backlogs. Ports processed 857 million TEUs in 2021, up 7% year-over-year. The latest Container Port Performance Index, which tracks total hours per ship call, showed that 172 ports improved their scores in 2022.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, however, especially for North American ports. The bottom three ports on the Index were Long Beach, CA; Vancouver, BC; and Savannah, GA.

All I Ask Is a Tall Ship and a Star to Steer Her By

A lot has changed since 1902, when John Masefield wrote that oft-quoted line to describe the call of the sea. For example, the center of global trade has shifted eastward to Asia, where 9 of the 10 busiest container ports are located.

Seaspan, a worldwide leader in independent management and ownership, is getting ready for the next era of shipping by adding 58 new state-of-the-art vessels over this year and next.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, The Shipping Industry: Plotting a Course for the Future, where we look at how shipping companies like Seaspan are preparing for a low-carbon future.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A new watchdog report detailed an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

Here are five takeaways.

Epstein’s Phone Call

Epstein was found dead in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on Aug. 10, 2019. The day before, he was allowed to make an unrecorded, unmonitored call, which went against Bureau of Prisons policy.

Records reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, the watchdog that conducted the probe, show that Epstein dialed a local 646 number after claiming he was going to call his mother.

Epstein’s mother died in 2004.

The manager of the unit in which Epstein was being held let Epstein make the call.  The manager told investigations that he dialed a number Epstein provided. A male answered. The manager then gave the phone to Epstein, who was quoted as saying: “Hey, how are you doing? How’s everything?”

Epstein spoke with the person for about 20 minutes.

Investigators identified the person on the other end. They sought an interview with the person, who was not identified in the report, but the person declined. A lawyer representing the person said that the person was in Belarus during the call. If true, the call was connected through a local number.

According to the lawyer, Epstein discussed how the media had been reporting on him. The call also went over “personal things such as books, music, and hygiene while incarcerated,” according to the report.

“According to the representations by Individual 1’s counsel, Epstein told Individual 1, ‘They are trying to keep me safe,’ and that his case would take a little longer than he originally thought,” the report stated. “He told Individual 1 he loved her, to be strong, and that he would not be able to call her again for another month.”

Not Monitored

The manager said he left after handing the phone to Epstein because his shift was over. The manager acknowledged he should have placed the phone on speaker and monitored the call, especially after a male answered, contradicting Epstein’s claim of calling his mother.

The manager said three individuals were nearby, the officer in charge of the unit for the evening, another officer, Tova Noel, and a senior officer specialist.

The evening officer said that he was present when the call was made but that he did not overhear the conversation. The officer said that during the call, officers were distracted by unspecified actions by another inmate. Noel said she did not monitor the call. The specialist said he did not witness the call.

A fourth officer identified by Noel as being around at the time told investigators he did not recall Epstein being in the area or making a call that evening.

The manager told investigators that he allowed Epstein to make an unmonitored call because he thought Epstein had been unable to obtain documentation to use the normal phone system.

That was false, investigators found. Epstein had obtained the documentation.

The Bureau of Prisons northeast regional director said that Epstein making the unmonitored call was concerning because “we don’t know what happened on that phone call.” The call “could have potentially led to” Epstein’s death, “but we will never know,” the director said.

Prosecutions Declined

Misconduct by officers, including forging records, led to the death, investigators said.

Noel and Michael Thomas, for instance, falsified records to show they’d been making required rounds when they actually did not check on Epstein after 10:40 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2019.

Noel and Thomas entered a deferred prosecution agreement after admitting to falsifying records.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres dismissed the charges in January at the request of prosecutors.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the case, declined to prosecute other employees despite investigators finding they falsified records, the inspector general’s office said.

Those records included documents on inmate counts and inmate checks on the day before and the day of Epstein’s death, the report stated.

The attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Moment Epstein Was Discovered

Officers finally began checking on inmates as they delivered them breakfast around 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10, 2019. That’s when they discovered Epstein.

Thomas knocked on Epstein’s door but there was no response, prompting Thomas to open it, Noel told investigators. Thomas said that Epstein had an orange string around his neck that was tied to a portion of the bunkbed, leaving him suspended. He ripped the string from the bed and lowered him to the ground before starting to perform CPR.

“Breathe, Epstein, breathe,” Thomas was quoted as saying by Noel. He was also quoted as saying, “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”

Noel said she did not enter the cell and that Epstein looked blue, was shirtless, and did not have anything on or around his neck.

After a lieutenant responded to the area, Noel said, Thomas told her, “we [messed] up.”

The lieutenant told investigators that after arriving, Noel said that “we didn’t do rounds at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.” while Thomas said “we didn’t do the rounds. We messed up.” A technician who helped deliver food in the aftermath of the death told investigators that inmates said: “You weren’t making rounds. You killed him.”

Suicide Determination

The New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner determined, following an autopsy, that Epstein killed himself by hanging.

Pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, after observing the autopsy, said that the evidence was more indicative of homicide. Epstein had tried killing himself about two weeks prior, according to his cellmate, and Epstein was briefly placed on suicide watch.

The medical examiner told the Office of the Inspector General that Epstein’s injuries were consistent with suicide by hanging and that there were no wounds that one would expect if Epstein had been defending himself against another person.

“Epstein did not have marks on his hands, broken fingernails or debris under them, contusions to his knuckles that would have evidenced a fight, or, other than an abrasion on his arm likely due to convulsing from hanging, bruising on his body,” the report stated, citing the examiner.