Whitney Webb Just Makes Stuff Up

Whitney Webb on the “Bad Faith” podcast with Briahna Joy Gray — August 1, 2025

NOTE FROM MT: Before publishing, I sent a copy of the letter below to Whitney Webb through one of her assistants. My inquiry to Webb, followed by her response, is enclosed at the end of this post. As you’ll see, she acknowledges that she made “two mistakes” on the podcast appearance in question, but her explanation for these “mistakes” is extremely muddled and confused, as is her description of the corrective action she claims to have taken. Webb attributes her “mistakes” to the fact that she has a newborn baby, and had “returned early from maternity leave […] due to subscriber pressure and demand related to the Epstein story.” As such, her interview with Briahna Joy Gray was her “first in a few months,” and she had “yet to get back into good interviewing habits and was nervous.” The last time she made such major “mistakes” in an interview, Webb claimed, was “over five years ago.” Astonishingly, Webb also concedes she has never read, nor apparently even heard of, the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report on Jeffrey Epstein, published November 12, 2020 — despite her 1,137-page book, “One Nation Under Blackmail,” having been published on October 20, 2022. The report contains bountiful evidence that directly refutes the entire premise of Webb’s book, as well as her entire 6+ year body of work on Epstein. Yet she was apparently unaware of its existence until I emailed her this week. I sent additional followup questions to Webb yesterday afternoon, but she said she was too busy to respond. So I gave her another day, and have yet to hear back. I will publish further updates as needed. Briahna Joy Gray has still not responded to my emails or DMs.

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August 6, 2025

To: Briahna Joy Gray

From: Michael Tracey

Hey,

I’ve been constantly commanded by commenters and emailers lately to engage with the work of Whitney Webb. Whenever I ask these commenters to please synthesize what it is they take to be the decisively convincing argument or evidence marshaled by Webb, they seem oddly incapable of doing so. Instead they just generically demand that I read her book and watch her podcast appearances, and then I will learn the error of my ways and become enlightened about Epstein. So, despite being somewhat befuddled that nobody can seem to distill or concisely communicate her thesis, I’ve nonetheless complied with these demands, and have begun reading her book and watching her podcast appearances.

The first podcast appearance I’ve watched was her discussion with you published to YouTube on August 1, 2025. And I’m sorry, but she just throws out a constant stream of authoritative-sounding fact claims that don’t survive basic scrutiny. I guess the audience is primed to assume she’s speaking from authority, because that’s how she’s generally touted in the alt-podcast sphere, but her factual unscrupulousness, poor sourcing, and dubious methodology is exasperating. And that’s setting aside the issues with her argumentation: for instance, you asked her to address the increasingly common suggestion that sexual blackmail networks could be what fundamentally explains why so many US politicians are uniformly supportive of Israel. She then veers into a winding exegesis on the Italian mafia, Roy Cohn, the Rothschilds, and a scattered array of other random stuff that I could barely follow. Her argument, if you can call it that, is the equivalent of throwing spaghetti at a wall. But that’s a side issue for the purposes of this letter I’m writing you. For now, I just want to focus narrowly on her basic factual misrepresentations with a few glaring examples. Sorry, this is going to be a bit long — but since I’m constantly told to engage seriously with Webb’s work, I think it’s worth doing.

1. Fact claim: Epstein was an FBI informant

Webb says, “And it’s important to point out that Epstein was an FBI informant during this period, so there may have been some duplicity there.” (at 18:58)

It’s unclear precisely what she means by “this period,” in terms of the period that Epstein was allegedly an FBI informant. She’s ostensibly talking about the period of time in which Alfredo Rodriguez was arrested for obstruction of justice in relation to his possession of the so-called “Little Black Book” that he acquired from Epstein’s house in Palm Beach, and then attempted to sell to lawyer Bradley Edwards for $50,000. Edwards then contacted the FBI, and Rodriguez was set up in a sting operation. Rodriguez was arrested on November 3, 2009. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on June 18, 2010. According to his deposition, he was employed by Epstein as a household manager in Palm Beach (not the US Virgin Islands) between August 2004 and February 2005.

So I don’t know what “period” she’s precisely talking about, but even if we were to define the period as from, say, 2000 to 2010, there’s simply no credible evidence that Epstein was an “FBI informant.”

It was notable that you asked Webb how she knows that “these men” (Epstein and Peter Thiel) were FBI informants. Webb says, “I’m pretty sure, in the case of Epstein, and it’s sourced in my book, but I’m pretty sure it’s the FBI admitted it, or another aspect of the government admitted it, because it came up in a court case. I forget which victim, court case.” (at 25:19)

I looked through Webb’s 1,137-page book for any “sourcing” which would substantiate her claim that Epstein was an FBI informant, and I cannot find it anywhere. But it’s a very long book, and it’s possible I missed something — hopefully she can clarify.

She may be referring to Exhibit A (see below, in my little ad hoc appendix) which is sometimes erroneously claimed to constitute proof that Epstein was an FBI informant. This banal FBI document simply certifies that as of September 2008, Epstein was complying with the conditions set forth by the Non-Prosecution Agreement that had gone into effect upon his guilty plea in June 2008. And therefore, any pending FBI forfeiture action could be halted.

The document doesn’t show that Epstein was an “FBI informant” for anything other than his own case. After the guilty plea, Epstein via his attorneys had to remain in communication with the Feds to furnish information pertaining to his compliance with various provisions of the NPA, particularly concerning “victim notification” procedures and Epstein’s agreement to pay certain monetary damages and legal fees.

Either way, this document didn’t “come up” in a “victim court case” — it was published on the FBI’s website in May 2018 pursuant to FOIA litigation initiated by the tabloid Radar Online. I can’t find any reference to the document in Webb’s book. And even if she did reference it, it would not in any way establish that Epstein was an FBI informant in September 2008, or any other time between 2000 and 2010.

I don’t know if Webb ever read the 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility report on the Epstein matter, but I suspect not, for several reasons. One, speculation around Epstein potentially having been an FBI informant is addressed in fairly extensive detail. (See Exhibit B.) The federal prosecutor in South Florida who was the most aggressive in wanting to indict Epstein, Marie Villafaña, said contemporaneously (in 2011) that rumors of Epstein potentially being an FBI informant were “an urban myth.” Villafaña added, “The FBI and I looked into this and do not believe that any of it is true.” I’m not saying the evidence in the OPR report is 100% dispositive, but it’s weird for Webb to not even mention it anywhere, or evince any awareness of its existence, if she’s going to assert as settled fact that Epstein was an FBI informant.

FOX Business also investigated the matter in 2019:

But a FOX Business investigation shows that Epstein did not provide any meaningful cooperation to obtain his relatively light sentence in the hedge fund case or likely any case tied to the financial crisis, according to numerous people with direct knowledge of the matter. In fact, Epstein’s cooperation with prosecutors does not appear to extend beyond supplying state and federal investigators with information involving his own case, these people add.

One of the former assistant U.S. attorneys on the Bear Stearns hedge fund case concurred.

“Bottom line, I have no knowledge of Epstein cooperating in any way in the Bear Stearns case,” the former prosecutor said in an interview, speaking under the condition of anonymity. “There was no reason to use him.”

A person close to Epstein with direct knowledge of the matter was even more emphatic about Epstein’s cooperation in any financial crisis prosecution: “It’s b------t.”

There were media innuendos circulating at the time (2009) that suggested Epstein “got such a low sentence because he was cooperating with the feds on the Bear Stearns prosecution,” Villafaña contemporaneously told colleagues. So she was contacted by New York prosecutors working on the Bear Stearns case, and they advised her they had “never heard of” Epstein until seeing these media rumors. “There has been absolutely no cooperation here or in New York, from what they told me,” Villafaña said, contemporaneously. (See Exhibit C.)

Again, I wouldn’t contend that this dispositively proves Epstein was never an FBI informant, or that it’s 100% impossible Epstein was ever an FBI informant. But there’s no credible evidence that he ever was an FBI informant, and significant evidence to the contrary. Even if you want to argue that Exhibit A potentially could suggest that Epstein was an FBI informant as of September 2008, which it really doesn’t, this still wouldn’t be anywhere close to dispositive enough for Webb to authoritatively state, as though proven fact, that Epstein was an FBI informant. But that’s a pattern with Webb: confident, matter-of-fact assertions with only the most tenuous evidentiary basis, if any. What she often seems to be doing is motivated-reasoning speculation dressed up as quasi-authoritative fact claims.

2. Fact claim: Alfredo Rodriguez died in prison

Webb says Alfredo Rodriguez “died the year that the book was published by Gawker, and also, in prison, and I’m not really sure there’s any information on the circumstances of his death.” (at 20:54)

I think around 10 minutes of your podcast conversation is probably based on this assertion.

It’s completely wrong. I thought Webb’s claim to fame was that she’s an incredibly meticulous and thorough researcher. But it didn’t take much strenuous research to show that her statement is false.

As mentioned above, Rodriguez was arrested on November 3, 2009. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on June 18, 2010. He had also been indicted on a separate gun charge on April 2, 2010. The judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison. (See Exhibit D). The separate gun charge added to his length of incarceration. He was released from the custody of the Bureau of Prisons on November 8, 2013. (See Exhibit E.) You can verify that this is the correct Alfredo Rodriguez by cross-checking his BOP register number with FOIA’d records from his case file. Alfredo Rodriguez died on December 28, 2014. (See Exhibit F, Exhibit G, and Exhibit H.) According to his wife, Rodriguez died of mesothelioma at age 60. Mother Jones reported on October 9, 2020: “Rodriguez died of mesothelioma shortly after serving his sentence.”

So I’m not really sure how Webb “isn’t really sure” if there’s “any information on the circumstances of his death,” because that’s some easily findable information on the circumstances of his death. And he didn’t die in prison, contrary to Webb’s assertions, which she uses to darkly intimate something sinister about Trump, because (she says) Trump happened to launch his presidential campaign the same year as Rodriguez’s death. Rodriguez died on December 28, 2014 and Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign on June 16, 2015; I guess I’ll give her a pass on that one. But she can’t get a pass on claiming that Rodriguez died in prison, and then use that claim to spur a flurry of nefarious inferences. If I’m wildly off here, and she has some inexplicable unknown evidence that Rodriguez did in fact die in prison, I’d be happy to take a look at it, but I don’t see any such evidence in her vast tome of a book.

3. Fact claim: Alfredo Rodriguez annotated his copy of the “Little Black Book” to implicate certain high-profile individuals, like Donald Trump, in sex-trafficking crimes

This one’s a bit less straightforward, but still emblematic of Webb’s dubious fidelity to the facts, in service of making specious and scandalizing inferences, and ultimately conveying a misleading impression to audiences. She says Alfredo Rodriguez circled, underlined, or otherwise annotated particular names in his copy of the “Little Black Book” to indicate his knowledge and belief that these individuals were “material witnesses and co-conspirators, and enablers I guess” of Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking crimes. (at 21:08)

It’s true: one of the names he circled was in fact Trump’s. (See Exhibit I)

But let’s take a look at Alfredo Rodriguez’s July 29, 2009 deposition. (This is the series of depositions that would ultimately get him in trouble, because he subsequently called up one of the lawyers present, Bradley Edwards, and offered to sell him his copy of the “Little Black Book” for $50,000. Edwards then did actually become a confidential FBI informant, reporting Rodriguez to the FBI — with whom Edwards proceeded to orchestrate a sting operation against Rodriguez.)

As we can see in Exhibit J, Rodriguez identifies Trump as someone he had Googled, because his curiosity had been piqued about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, in light of the fact that Trump would sometimes call Epstein’s house, and Rodriguez would take the message. Rodriguez is then asked if he ever saw Trump at the Palm Beach house. “No, he used to call,” Rodriguez says.

Rodriguez therefore would seem to have indicated, in his own words, that he never visually observed anything that could implicate Trump in hypothetical sex-trafficking crimes, because he never saw Trump at the house at all. Could Trump have said something over the phone, when Rodriguez was taking his message, that could hypothetically implicate Trump as a “co-conspirator, material witness, or enabler” of sex-trafficking crimes? It’s hypothetically possible. But are there more plausible explanations for why Rodriguez might’ve circled Trump’s name?

Let’s remember, Rodriguez was trying to sell his copy of the “Little Black Book” for $50,000 to Bradley Edwards, one of the lawyers who had just deposed him, and who he knew was representing alleged victims of Epstein in various legal proceedings. He would thus have a motive to make annotations that, by his lights, would emphasize to Edwards that Edwards should pay him the money, because the book would be helpful to Edwards. From this perspective, it would make perfect sense that Rodriguez would highlight or “circle” the names of the most prominent individuals he could find in the book, and who he knew to have at least some relationship with Epstein. Trump was the host of The Apprentice, a well-known celebrity, and had sometimes called Epstein’s house. Rodriguez thus circled his name. Did he circle Trump’s name upon genuine information and belief that Trump was complicit in sex-trafficking crimes? There’s no discernible reason to think that. In his deposition, Rodriguez never evinces any knowledge at all about Trump’s hypothetical participation in any sex-trafficking crimes, or even any cognizance that Trump could hypothetically be accused of such things. It seems far more likely that Rodriguez was instead circling the name of the host of The Apprentice to entice Bradley Edwards to pay him $50,000 for his copy of the book. (Rodriguez was unemployed, and increasingly destitute.)

Webb adds, “Courtney Love was also a circled name.” (at 22:25)

Just throwing this out there, but maybe the reason Courtney Love’s name was also circled in the book is because she was also a famous celebrity? Similar to Donald Trump? And Rodriguez was trying to sell the book for $50,000? Webb, however, has a different theory. She postulates that Alfredo Rodriguez, a jobless Bolivian household attendant, could have been circling Courtney Love’s name because he somehow knew Love to be involved in a “weird circle of intelligence-linked stuff,” through Love’s father’s association with… the Grateful Dead? WTF?

This kind of outlandish inferential reasoning animates much of Webb’s output, from what I can gather. And there’s much more I could go through — but Webb floods the viewer and reader with such a high volume of questionable assertions in such rapid succession that it would take several lifetimes to parse everything. Which I guess may be the point.

Anyway, I would think some kind of correction or clarification would be in order, at least on the straightforwardly incorrect or unsubstantiated factual claims. Audiences are clearly being misled when they take Webb at face value, and when she’s given the imprimatur of journalistic authority.

Last point: after enough people kept hectoring me to “read Whitney Webb’s book,” despite their curious inability to summarize the book’s key arguments or evidence, I finally opened up to the first page of her book. That would be One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 1, page 1. This is where Webb seemingly spells out her impetus for writing the 1,137-page book in the first place. And amazingly, it turns out her impetus for writing the book is the same old endlessly recycled, triple-hearsay quote attributed to Alex Acosta, in which Acosta is purported to have said he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that’s why he gave Epstein a “sweetheart deal.”

Yet, for both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, there is much more to the story. This became apparent when it emerged that Alex Acosta, then-serving as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to “intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm or deny the claim.

Webb presents this quote as though it’s an on-record, unassailable, declaratory statement from Acosta. But it’s not. As Webb surely knows, it’s from a single 2019 Daily Beast article by Vicky Ward. Ward ascribes the quote to something she’d been told “a couple of years” prior by a “former senior White House official” — almost certainly Steve Bannon, the gossiper-in-chief, with whom Ward had been collaborating on a book assailing Jared Kushner, Bannon’s arch nemesis during the first Trump Administration. (By the way, Acosta obviously never used the term “sweetheart deal,” despite Webb’s misattributed quotation.)

Webb in 2019, when asked what “inspired” her to start writing about Epstein, said: “I originally wasn’t going to write about it, but decided to after it was revealed that Alex Acosta said the reason that he had backed off pursuing Epstein to a more full extent of the law was that he had ‘belonged to intelligence.’”

I’m frequently assured that Webb is an ace researcher. Why did she not more diligently research the provenance of this quote, which apparently inspired her entire body of work on Epstein? Why does she fail to provide any qualifying context in her representation of this perpetually misused and oversold quote? Instead, she relays it as though Acosta swore an affidavit admitting he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that’s why he gave Epstein a “sweetheart deal.” The reality is something approximately the exact opposite. Because the one time Acosta actually did address Epstein’s alleged connections to “intelligence” — under oath, and under penalty of perjury — he responded directly and unambiguously. When asked by DOJ OPR investigators if Acosta had any knowledge that Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” Acosta said: “The answer is no.” (See Exhibit K)

Webb’s book was published on October 20, 2022, but there’s nothing I can find across the thousand-plus pages that would indicate she ever gave a passing glance to the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report on Jeffrey Epstein, published November 12, 2020, which she presumably would’ve had ample opportunity to review, and which contains the countervailing Acosta quote that she fails to mention. Then again, Webb is on the record declaring her belief that Epstein was an “intel asset pedophile,” so I guess no report is likely to disabuse her of that conviction. Likewise, authoritative statements from Webb such as “[Israel] had Epstein blackmail US politicians through the mass rape of American children” may not leave much in the way of wiggle room.

Now, it could still of course be possible that Epstein was an intelligence asset. But if the sourcing for your marquee piece of evidence is basically bogus, and you egregiously misrepresent the quote’s probative value on the very first page of your book, and you fail to make any mention of the flatly contradictory evidence that is firmly established in the public record… well, I think we know where this is going. It’s also ironic that Webb has denounced Vicky Ward as a “snake” and “part of the cover-up” — but nonetheless was content to use Ward’s triple-hearsay reportage as the launchpad for her entire Epstein oeuvre. Indeed, Webb’s publisher plasters the fabled “belonged to intelligence” quote at the very top of the book’s promotional material. (See Exhibit L.) A note from the publisher at the outset of the book details the many difficulties TrineDay Press had previously faced trying to get the media to cover “pedophilia scandals” — but celebrates that they finally managed a breakthrough with Webb.

I have repeatedly messaged Webb with questions, and an invitation to discuss these issues in some public format, but haven’t received any response. (See Exhibit M.) I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume she would in fact reply — maybe she just doesn’t check DMs. I admittedly don’t have her email address or phone number. So could you please pass along this letter to her? If I don’t receive a response within a day or so, I guess I will probably just publish it as some sort of “open letter.”

-MT

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APPENDIX

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

Exhibit D

Exhibit E

Exhibit F

Exhibit G

Exhibit H

Exhibit I

Exhibit J

Exhibit K

Exhibit L

Exhibit M

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EMAIL EXCHANGE BETWEEN MICHAEL TRACEY AND WHITNEY WEBB:

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