Hey Everyone,
Today at 5pm, I won’t be hosting my usual live video chat because I will be in transit. I am headed to Norway, to speak at Norway’s annual SKUP conference in Tonsberg, Norway’s oldest city, on the coast, about 100km from Oslo.
SKUP is the Norwegian Foundation for Investigative Journalism, so I am honored to have been invited to be a keynote speaker.
To be honest, what I am most looking forward to - apart from having lunch at the beautiful restaurant, Verdens Ende (The End Of The World) photographed above - is learning the details about the fall-out of the Epstein Files in Norway from some of the country’s top journalists.
Of all the countries in the world, you could easily make the case that Norway’s upper echelons have been hit hardest by the revelations in Epstein’s emails.
It emerged in the files that Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit continued a close friendship with Epstein for years after his conviction as a sex offender. She is mentioned over one thousand times in Epstein’s emails between 2011 and 2014. She stayed in his house in Palm Beach in 2013. And, In 2011 she emailed him: “Googled you after the previous email. Agreed, it didn’t look good :).”
She and her husband, Crown Prince Haakon, recently sat for a televised interview in which she apologized for her “poor judgment” and said she had not known of Epstein’s sex offender status. Nonetheless a Norwegian sexual health organization has severed ties with her and questions remain as to whether or not the country will allow her one day to become Queen. (Also on her plate, is the fact that her 29 year old son, Marius Borg Høiby is awaiting the verdict after the conclusion of a trial in which he was charged with 39 offenses, including four rapes, which he denies).
Then there is former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, (above) who is under investigation “on suspicion of aggravated corruption”. The files revealed he planned to visit Epstein’s island in 2014. The trip was cancelled but the back and forth about the arrangements raise questions about conflicts of interest, given that Jagland was Secretary-General of the Council of Europe and chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee at the time. I must say I stopped in my tracks when I read an email from Epstein to Steve Bannon in the files, joking that he could get Bannon a Nobel Prize for his work on “China’.
Troublingly, Epstein used his relationship with Jagland as a calling card to try to get to Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. He told Jagland that Lavrov (and by extension, Putin) should think of him as someone who could provide useful “insight” into President Trump. Of course, Epstein and Trump had not spoken since 2004, but no matter. We know that Epstein had extraordinary chutzpah. That’s what made him such a successful con artist.
Then we get to the married senior diplomats Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul.
Rød-Larsen (above) is a political scientist who was the architect of the Oslo Accords. He was later President of the International Peace Institute (IPI), a major global think tank.
In 2020 he had to resign from IPI when it emerged he had accepted donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Epstein’s foundations.
Much worse, though, in the Epstein Files it emerged not only that were the two men extremely chummy, but that Rød-Larsen had accepted a $130,000 loan from Epstein in 2013 that was not disclosed to the board of IPI. Because of this, his wife Mona Juul, Norway’s ambassador to the UN felt obliged to step down from her post this year.
What a mess!
BUT the Norwegian government is wasting no time in investigating all this. And therein, one could make the case, lies the great difference between their country and ours.
I am greatly looking forward to learning what Norway’s media feels about the US’s handling of the files, by comparison to theirs.
So, stay tuned!
So good Vicky!!!!!! You deliver.
Have a good trip, Vicky!