☕️ SHADOWS OF SHAME ☙ Friday, February 27, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Hillary channels Sgt. Schultz and doesn't recall: Boebert sneaks a tense photo; AI fires 40% of staff and stocks soar; Rothschild is the real victim; Davos CEO falls and Dominoes keep dropping; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! February has slipped through the net; just one more day and then we tilt over into March. Your roundup includes: Hillary Clinton’s six-hour Chappaqua deposition where she remembered absolutely nothing about Jeffrey Epstein — except that she doesn’t know him, never met him, and you should ask Bill; Lauren Boebert’s contraband cell-phone photo and her Benghazi-flavored response to critics; why Jack Dorsey just fired 4,000 people and Wall Street threw him a party; the Rothschild banking heiress who’s very upset you’re reading her Epstein emails; and the Davos CEO who just resigned because three little dinners turned out to be three dinners too many.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a typically onside story headlined, “Hillary Clinton Denies Knowing Epstein or His Crimes in a Tense Deposition.” Tense. When a Clinton gets deposed about a global sex trafficking operation and the Times deploys the word “tense,” you know they’re doing their very best work. Hard-hitting journalism.

The former first lady, senator, secretary of state, and presidential also-ran sat for roughly six hours of closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee in Chappaqua, New York. The committee traveled to her turf because, apparently, requiring a former secretary of state to visit Washington, D.C. was too much to ask. In a blistering opening statement that she herself helpfully released to the press, Clinton called the sworn proceedings “partisan political theatre,” a “fishing expedition,” and “an insult to the American people.” In other words, it was going great.

Deposing any lawyer is challenging, since attorneys know all the rules, tricks, and gambits. Deposing former lawyer and consummate scandal-dodger Clinton is like wrestling a greased porcupine. And what, at this point, does it even matter?

She repeatedly insisted she’d never met Jeffrey Epstein —“I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein,” she told reporters afterward— and complained that toward the end, the questions veered into territory she found “quite unusual,” including Pizzagate and UFOs. Imagine being questioned about the most notorious sex trafficking operation in modern history and being offended that someone brought up a conspiracy theory that turned out to be mostly right.

Following the deposition, last night, independent pundits and social media investigators started shoveling up scores of Epstein emails strongly suggesting Hillary was Whitewatering the facts (Portlanders: lying). Here’s one example (of many):

“He doesn’t know that you know each other.” “I guess you know her pretty well.” Last night, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky) said Hillary was shown emails like this one and still maintained she never met Epstein. She also denied she’s ever been to Arkansas, ever went to Washington, and said she wasn’t Obummer’s Secretary of State. (Okay, I took a little authorial liberty there, but you get the point.)

Assuming the Committee can cobble together any evidence that Hillary did meet Epstein, even once, even a single picture of the two of them together, then perjury charges will be on the table.

According to various reports trickling out of the session, Hillary could not recall anything about Bill’s relationship with the convicted sex offender, did not recognize any of the girls in the photos, and generally deferred questions to Bill. “You’ll have to ask my husband about that,” she said. According to the Times, when Nancy Mace asked Hillary how she felt about seeing Bill in the pictures, Hillary “coolly” answered, “we’re not here to discuss my feelings.” (Lawyer skill, activated.)

Minor drama ensued when Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) broke a pre-deposition agreement and snapped a candid cell-phone photo of Hillary during testimony. Lauren texted it to influencer Benny Johnson, who promptly posted it on X. Hillary’s team quickly found out, the hearing was suspended, hot words were exchanged, and the proceedings resumed a half hour later. Democrats called it “unacceptable.”

Lauren Boebert, unchagrined, “tensely” pointed out, “No US ambassadors were harmed in the taking of today’s photo.” She really said it:

Later, in response to a rude C-SPAN reporter’s question while she was strolling her son, Lauren added, “I just returned to my hotel room and installed the BleachBit software, and took a hammer to my iPad. So, I guess, in regards to taking photos, I do not recall.” Clip (0:23).

Had Boebert not smuggled the tense photo out, the Times would have called Hillary “defiant” instead of “tense.” (While Boebert admittedly broke the rules, it’s important to note that Hillary’s team wanted the proceedings live-streamed, and it was Congressional Republicans who demanded the closed-door context. Just saying.)

Hillary abruptly terminated what was supposed to be a post-deposition media victory lap after she got a tough question about why Maxwell attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010:

CLIP: Hillary beetles off after political instincts flare up (0:26).

Hillary was the warm-up act. Today it’s Bill’s turn. He will become the first former president deposed by Congress. One suspects Bill may recall even less than Hillary.

In related news, BleachBit gained 10% in overnight trading.

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Meanwhile, in a different kind of earthquake, things are unfolding just as quickly as we thought; maybe faster. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Block Cuts 40% of Its Work Force Because of Its Embrace of A.I.” In Block’s case, 40% translates to shaving headcount by around 4,000 of its previously 10,000 employees— even though the digital payments company just posted its most profitable quarter in history. Get this: the company’s stock skyrocketed +26% on the news.

For context, Jack Dorsey was the tech bro who originally co-founded Twitter. He abruptly resigned as CEO in November, 2021, amid rumors that he fought with the board over the social media company’s censorship flex. (Later, a year after Dorsey left, Elon bought the whole thing.) Dorsey shifted his attention to his other company, Block, a financial payment processing firm that owns Square and Cash App and is somehow involved in cryptocurrency. It’s complicated.

The iconoclastic Dorsey announced the layoffs —how else?— in a dramatic tweet channeling poet e.e. cummings, with no upper case, perhaps to rhetorically lessen the sting or signal some kind of punctuative humility. Or maybe his shift key was broken. “today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company,” Dorsey lowkey tweeted. “we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.”

That sounds harsh, but if you read the whole thing, Dorsey comes across more as “let’s face facts and rip off the band-aid together” than as a heartless dictator. At one point in the long missive, he explained, “i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to trust.”

Dorsey also announced very generous severance packages: “salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need.”

So far, the story is being framed as AI kneecapping junior developers and entry-level white-collar workers, a simplistic but click-getting analysis that satisfied the Times. But here’s where the story gets even more interesting.

🤖 I’ve written recently about the quiet but sudden AI revolution, the new generation of tools transcending passive chatbots, the introduction of proactivity by always-on AI that keeps working even when you’re not peppering it with questions about whether dogs miss you when you’re not home. Passive AI is a glorified search engine, which is fine. But proactive AI that can do stuff starts to look a lot more like an employee.

That’s exactly what I told you was coming, and the Block story proves it has arrived. If we focus only on the fear-inducing narrative of AI gobbling up jobs, well, it’s true that anyone whose job is mostly done on a screen may soon need to recalibrate. In that sense, screen time is about to go way down for a lot of people. Let’s see how it worked at Block.

According to industry reports, Block built an open-source AI agent code-named ‘Goose’(powered by multiple AI platforms including Anthropic, like the original OpenClaw bot) and deployed it across the entire company. One engineer said that 90% of his code is now written by Goose. Non-technical teams are using it to write their own SQL queries, close support tickets, and manage inventory without needing engineers. Block’s Chief Technology Officer told Lenny’s Newsletter that Goose saves employees at least 8 to 10 hours per week.

The financial evidence is hard to quibble over.

Block’s fourth-quarter gross profit hit $2.87 billion, up +24% year over year. Cash App grew +33%. Operating income soared from $13 million to $485 million in twelve months. Block raised its 2026 outlook to $12.2 billion in gross profit. All that growth came while the company was already quietly shrinking, down from 13,000 employees in 2023 to 11,000 by late 2025.

Dorsey is just taking it to its logical conclusion. A Block with 6,000 employees generates the same revenue as a Block with 13,000. Following these layoffs, the key revenue-per-employee metric doubled overnight. The company went from $2.2 million per employee to $4.2 million, homing in on the lucrative efficiency ratios of industry darlings Shopify and Stripe.

Dorsey, whose title is really “Block Head,” obviously saw strong Q4 numbers that could absorb $500 million in severance costs— and he went for it. He’s betting the company that smaller teams with AI assistants will outperform larger teams without them.

Block just became the first major public company to wholesale restructure around quantifiable AI productivity gains. The first domino. If it works, competition will do the rest.

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Epstein fallout roundup! First, the UK Telegraph ran this elite panic headline earlier this week:

Billionaire Baroness Ariane de Rothschild, 60, leads the notorious family’s storied investment firm, the Edmond de Rothschild Group. She emailed Epstein a lot. She visited him —without her husband— stayed at his properties, gossiped, and complained about “B” (her husband’s name was Benjamin). For instance, she once vented, “B was a disaster” and “I’m tired of handling him.” He died around 18 months afterwards of a heart attack, aged 57.

According to the Guardian, Epstein and Ariane “frequently coordinated diaries and timings for potential meet-ups around the globe and conversations over the phone.”

Epstein is dead (allegedly). The Baroness has now entered a new, more visible phase of her public life, one involving intense criticism of her lack of good judgment, and raising obvious questions about her suitability to manage other people’s money. It’s a lot of scrutiny and she doesn’t like it.

In a recent letter Ariane sent to Rothschild Group clients, she complained that she and her daughters had been “deeply hurt and shocked by the scandalous accusations directed at us, particularly on social media.” Tracking precisely with the themes we’ve seen in all the recent “moral panic” stories, Ariane told clients that “The violence of certain shortcuts and unfounded accusations contributes to a climate one might have thought belonged to another time.”

Haha, “another time.” She means New England witch hunts. Just like all the ‘moral panic’ articles. Oh well, I suppose billionaires are allowed to buy reporters like everybody else.

The client letter was obviously a response to concerns. One unnamed Rothschild Group client told the Guardian they were concerned about legal or financial risks that might flow from the Epstein disclosures. “If the bank is affected legally or financially, that puts me at risk,” the client said. “If management accepted or overlooked this type of association, how can integrity be guaranteed?”

In the letter, Ariane made three general arguments: (1) the files involved her in nothing illegal (or as Bill Gates would say, “illicit”), (2) some of the emails were “false or altered” (she didn’t say which ones), and (3) she is the real victim here, of the public’s moral panic and rush to judgment (she said people ignored “context and chronology”).

🔥 Yesterday, Axios ran the very latest fallout story, headlined, “The Epstein files keep toppling the powerful. The latest: the man who runs Davos.” No wonder the elites are panicking. First Klaus, now this.

I have to admit, I kind of like far-left Axios. I respect its bullet-point-formatted quick hits and —relatively speaking— its neutral framing. But the reporter on this story allowed himself a little poetic license. “The files have captured some of the world’s most powerful people in a far-reaching shadow of shame,” the story effused, “effectively ending the careers of captains of industry, academic big shots, and prominent politicians. And the dominoes keep falling.”

Nicely worded, and he used capital letters.

Yesterday, the World Economic Forum’s Chief Executive Officer since 2017, Norwegian Børge Brende, announced his resignation following uncomfortable disclosures of Epstein ties. Michael Shellenberger would hate this one. Brende only appeared in the Epstein files a relatively modest 60 times or so, documenting three business dinners and an odd assortment of text messages and cordial communications. Nothing gross or even particularly salacious. Just general chumminess, after Epstein’s first arrest and guilty plea.

🔥 The more I see from the Epstein files, the more convinced I am that Epstein was being careful, and wasn’t documenting whatever it was that he was really up to. And it does look like he was involved in things he wasn’t writing down. In an interview with Mario Nawfal on X, Forensic analyst Dr. Jason Garrison, who has extensively reviewed the files, highlighted several instances where Epstein explicitly stated variations like, “I don’t like putting things in writing, call me instead.”

CLIP: Jeffrey Epstein didn’t like putting things in writing (1:55).

What we are seeing is the sanitized version. When people talk about minimizing their evidentiary footprint, they usually suggest something like “limit written communications to pleasantries and logistics.” Most of Epstein’s prolific comms (though not all) follow this advice.

The point is, all these elites insisting they were unwise but did nothing illegal, obscures the 90% of the iceberg of communications below the logistical discussions we see above the waterline. For instance, Børge Brende’s comments show arranging dinners with Epstein. The question nobody seems to be asking is: what was discussed at the dinner? There are plenty of hints. Jeffrey was, for example, very interested in genetics, vaccines, and DNA. He does not seem very interested in real philanthropy.

A genuine philanthropist doesn’t need to launder donations through shell entities, doesn’t tell recipients to hide the source, and doesn’t use the giving as a mechanism to get one-on-one meetings with young researchers and grad students.

The “I don’t like putting things in writing” lines kind of say it all. Real philanthropy doesn’t need operational security. You don’t need to go to voice-only mode to discuss a donation to cancer research.

Even the science stuff he supposedly cared about —transhumanism, eugenics-adjacent genetics research, the “seeding the human race” obsession— that wasn’t philanthropy. That was a weird personal fixation he funded for his own purposes, swaddled in enough academic jargon to get seriously money-hungry people in the room.

Now that the “get Trump” excitement has faded and the reality of the “shadows of shame” has permeated progressive minds, there is an attempted switcheroo in progress. Even though the two highest-profile arrests —former Prince Andrew and former Ambassador and political fixer Peter Mandelson— were legally founded in “political corruption,” the captive media continues to fixate on salacious sex trafficking issues.

If someone like Børge Brende isn’t connected to sex trafficking, the media’s logic goes, then they are just innocent victims of moral panic, not wrongdoers.

But as most of the public intuitively understands, this story is far bigger than sex trafficking. Most of all, Epstein and his canoodlers are stories about political and elite corruption at the highest levels. We haven’t yet seen a fraction of what was really going on. But, as Axios said: the dominoes keep falling.

Have a fantastic Friday! Coffee & Covid shall return tomorrow morning, with a Weekend Edition roundup of all the essential news you need to know, plus a dollop of snarky commentary and narrative dismantling.

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