Steve Hilton is running for Governor of California. He has raised $7.1 million. His named major donors include Rupert Murdoch and Sergey Brin. The ideological network surrounding his campaign includes Peter Thiel, whose Palantir Technologies is now the AI targeting infrastructure behind Israeli military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Every one of these men appears in the Epstein files.
The man who connected them across a decade of elite access brokerage was also the man who put Steve Hilton’s name into those files. His name is Ian Osborne. DOJ Epstein file EFTA01861186 contains an email from Rohan Silva, Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit under David Cameron, to Ian Osborne. It reads: “Hi, a funny one this, but Steve and I are really keen to meet up with Woody Allen. I don’t suppose you know someone who knows someone who knows him, do you?” Steve is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s Director of Strategy, the second most powerful unelected official in the British government at the time. Osborne’s response, documented in EFTA01861385, was to forward the request directly to Jeffrey Epstein, describing Allen as “your friend” and offering Cameron himself as additional incentive. EFTA00915738 confirms Osborne told Epstein “Yes, we would arrange it so that Cameron would be there for at least part of his time at No 10.”
Woody Allen is documented in the files as a regular guest at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse from 2010 onward. In 2025 Allen stated publicly he had no regrets about his friendship with Epstein. Read that slowly. The Director of Strategy for the British Prime Minister used a man who was simultaneously structuring Jeffrey Epstein’s investment empire as his personal fixer for celebrity access. The sitting Prime Minister was offered as currency to a convicted sex trafficker to arrange a meeting with one of Epstein’s closest documented social contacts. This is not a peripheral mention in a news article. This is operational. Now follow the money into Hilton’s campaign and follow every dollar back into the files. Rupert Murdoch is a named major donor to Steve Hilton’s governor campaign.
Murdoch employed Hilton at Fox News for six years, building the platform Hilton is now using to run for office. Murdoch is in Epstein’s personal contact book. Documents EFTA02159573, EFTA02159642, and EFTA02159729 show that in September 2012, four years after Epstein’s conviction for child sex crimes, Epstein was actively orchestrating a meeting between Wendi Deng Murdoch and the head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee through Ian Osborne. In that same email thread Osborne references a Bloomberg commitment that same evening. The Osborne legal memo in EFTA01108051 shows Osborne and Partners was simultaneously managing confidential PR strategy for Rupert Murdoch personally during the phone hacking criminal scandal. The man bankrolling Hilton’s path to Sacramento had his family and his criminal defense being managed by the same fixer who was routing Hilton’s access requests through Epstein’s network. Sergey Brin is a named major donor to Steve Hilton’s governor campaign. Brin appears on Epstein’s Seminar-MONEY invite list documented in EFTA02172320 and EFTA02172748, an attendee list coordinated between Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff and Ian Osborne. Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome placed Brin and his then-wife Anne Wojcicki on Epstein’s private island. Brin communicated directly with Ghislaine Maxwell about dinner at Epstein’s townhouse in 2003. The US Virgin Islands subpoenaed Brin in 2023 in connection with Epstein’s JPMorgan banking relationships. Brin and Osborne appear on the same Epstein conference planning documents. Brin is now writing checks to the man whose colleagues used Osborne as their fixer. Now come to Peter Thiel and what the Epstein files reveal about Palantir, Israel, and the surveillance infrastructure that is now killing civilians across the Middle East. Peter Thiel appears in 2,906 documents in the Epstein files. He attended dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. He was invited to Epstein’s private island. He co-organized the Dialog 2014 off-the-record retreat and directly invited Jeffrey Epstein to attend. His relationship with Epstein lasted from 2012 through January 2019, six months before Epstein’s arrest, continuing eight years after Epstein’s conviction for child sex crimes. Epstein’s primary conduit for reaching Thiel during those years was Ian Osborne, the same Ian Osborne who was simultaneously managing Hilton’s access requests and Murdoch’s criminal PR and structuring Hedosophia with Epstein’s financial guidance. The Palantir-Israel connection that now defines Thiel’s legacy did not emerge organically. According to DOJ documents reported by Jacobin and Boing Boing, Epstein spent years trying to connect Thiel with former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, arranging at least six separate meetings because Barak specifically wanted to connect Israeli national security infrastructure with Silicon Valley AI capabilities. A June 2014 dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment brought Thiel, Barak, and Epstein together to discuss Israeli security. Epstein’s emails record Thiel responding enthusiastically that the evening was “very Israeli and very stimulating.” Barak pushed Epstein to organize an AI and warfare seminar with Thiel and other top thinkers. A recorded conversation from 2013 captured in the DOJ files has Epstein advising Barak to look at Palantir as a business opportunity and offering to broker a senior role for Barak at Thiel’s firm. In 2018 Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $15 million investment round into Carbyne, an Israeli cybersecurity company with roots in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s cyber intelligence arm, a deal arranged directly through the Epstein introduction network. Today Palantir holds a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. It was named by the United Nations in 2025 as one of the companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza. Its AI systems including Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy identified over 37,000 Palestinians for targeting in the first months of the war alone. In February 2026 Palantir’s data analysis was part of the military planning for Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israel strike on Iran. Asked about ethical concerns Thiel has stated publicly “my bias is to defer to Israel.” The path from Epstein’s dinner table to Gaza’s kill lists runs through documented introductions in the files you can search right now at justice.gov/epstein. Thiel has not donated directly to Hilton’s California campaign in amounts currently visible in state filings. But the ideological and financial network he represents saturates Hilton’s donor base and political identity. Hilton was endorsed by Vivek Ramaswamy, a Thiel network figure. His entire Silicon Valley donor ecosystem operates inside the same tech-nationalist ideological framework Thiel has spent two decades building. The question is not whether Thiel’s money is directly in Hilton’s campaign today. The question is what a Hilton governorship does for the regulatory environment in the state where Palantir operates, where Sergey Brin’s Alphabet dominates the digital economy, and where Rupert Murdoch’s media empire wants to consolidate further. Ian Osborne is the thread that binds this entire network. Over a dozen Epstein documents show Osborne and Epstein structuring Hedosophia, the secretive Guernsey investment fund explicitly branded for elite circles with a $50 to $80 million initial target that became one of London’s most important tech investment vehicles, backing Uber, Spotify, Alibaba, and Ant Financial. Osborne appears 108 times in the indexed Epstein files, the fifth most frequent non-Epstein figure in the entire corpus. He was simultaneously managing access to British government for Epstein, managing Murdoch’s criminal PR, appearing on Epstein’s Silicon Valley conference planning lists alongside Brin, serving as the primary conduit for Epstein’s attempts to reach Peter Thiel, and transmitting Steve Hilton’s personal access requests to a convicted pedophile as though this was a normal way to navigate elite networks. Because in that world, it was. A Hilton governorship viewed through this lens is not a mystery. It is a projection. Murdoch gets a California governor whose communications infrastructure is modeled on Fox News and who owes his entire political platform to Murdoch’s media machine. Brin and Alphabet get a governor committed to dismantling the regulatory framework California has built around tech accountability, data privacy, and gig worker protections. The Thiel-Palantir network gets a governor in the most powerful state in America who will not challenge surveillance capitalism, will not resist defense contractor capture of state technology contracts, and will not question the foreign policy commitments of the men who built his career. The Cameron austerity playbook that Hilton directed in the UK, which cut public services by 25 to 40 percent while slashing taxes for the donor class, gets a new laboratory in the largest state economy on earth. And underneath all of it, the Epstein question that this community asks better than anyone else. Epstein’s documented function was not just introductions. It was the systematic accumulation of information that created leverage and long-term obligation among the most powerful people in the world. We know what has been released. We do not know what remains redacted. We do not know what Osborne, Murdoch, Brin, Thiel, and their networks discussed in the documents still withheld. We do not know what Epstein knew about the people now funding Steve Hilton’s campaign. We do not know what information from those relationships persists and what it is worth when one of the network’s own seeks the governorship of California. What we know is what the released files already show. And what they already show is damning enough. Follow the money. Then follow it into the files. Then ask what the files they haven’t released yet might say. All Epstein file references are drawn from the DOJ EFTA production publicly searchable at justice.gov/epstein. Key document numbers: EFTA01861186, EFTA01861385, EFTA00915738, EFTA02159573, EFTA02159642, EFTA02159729, EFTA02172320, EFTA02172748, EFTA01843639, EFTA01842917, EFTA01842514, EFTA01849248. Palantir-Israel-Epstein reporting sourced from Jacobin March and April 2026, Middle East Eye, Boing Boing, and AFSC Investigate. Campaign finance figures sourced from California Secretary of State filings April 2026. Peter Thiel Epstein file data sourced from epsteinexposed.com indexed corpus of 2.77 million released pages.
Important context. Researchers estimate the DOJ has released only a fraction of the total Epstein files. Millions of pages remain unreleased, redacted, or withheld under law enforcement exemptions. What follows is drawn exclusively from documents already made public at justice.gov/epstein. What has not yet been released may tell a far more complete story. Keep that in mind as you read every connection documented below, because every connection below exists in what Epstein’s network apparently considered safe enough to leave in writing.
Additionally Rupert Murdoch’s criminal scandal is one of the most extensively documented cases of institutional corruption in the history of modern media and it is worth understanding in full detail because it reveals exactly how his network operates and why his connection to Ian Osborne in the Epstein files is so significant and why his investment in Steve Hilton’s California governor campaign should alarm every voter in the state regardless of their political affiliation. The phone hacking scandal began at News of the World, Murdoch’s British tabloid that had been publishing since 1843 and was one of the highest circulation newspapers in the English-speaking world. Journalists and private investigators working for the paper had been illegally accessing the voicemail messages of thousands of people including members of the royal family, politicians, celebrities, and crime victims going back to at least the early 2000s. The initial exposure came in 2006 when royal correspondent Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were arrested and convicted for hacking the phones of royal aides. News International, Murdoch’s UK subsidiary, initially claimed the hacking was limited to Goodman acting as a lone bad actor, a defense that collapsed completely over the following five years as evidence of systemic institutional hacking emerged. The scandal reached its most explosive moment in July 2011 when the Guardian newspaper revealed that News of the World journalists had hacked the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a 13 year old schoolgirl who had been abducted and murdered in 2002. Journalists had accessed and deleted her voicemail messages while she was still missing, giving her family false hope that she was alive and simultaneously destroying evidence in a murder investigation. The public outrage was immediate and overwhelming. Within days Murdoch announced the closure of News of the World after 168 years of publication. It was the single most dramatic act of corporate damage control in British media history and it did not work. What followed was a years-long criminal investigation that ultimately resulted in the arrest of dozens of journalists, executives, and police officers. Rebekah Brooks, who had been editor of News of the World during the Milly Dowler hacking period and later became chief executive of News International, was arrested and charged with phone hacking, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and misconduct in public office. She was acquitted of all charges in 2014 in a verdict that shocked many observers given the documentary evidence presented. Her husband Charlie Brooks was convicted of perverting the course of justice for helping hide evidence including a laptop during the investigation. Andy Coulson, another former News of the World editor who had become David Cameron’s director of communications at Downing Street, the same Downing Street where Steve Hilton served as Director of Strategy, was convicted of phone hacking conspiracy and sentenced to 18 months in prison. The fact that Cameron’s communications chief was convicted of criminal conspiracy while Hilton was serving as Cameron’s strategy chief is a context that almost never gets mentioned in coverage of Hilton’s California campaign. The police corruption dimension is equally significant and less well understood. The Metropolitan Police had investigated phone hacking in 2006 and essentially buried the investigation despite having evidence of widespread criminal activity. A subsequent inquiry found that senior Metropolitan Police officers had taken payments from News International journalists for information and had actively suppressed the investigation to protect their relationships with Murdoch’s organization. Several police officers were ultimately convicted of corrupt payments. The relationship between Murdoch’s organization and British law enforcement was not just one of institutional deference. It was documented financial corruption operating over years. The parliamentary dimension produced some of the most extraordinary scenes in British political history. Murdoch and his son James appeared before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in July 2011. During the hearing a protestor attacked Murdoch with a foam pie, his wife Wendi Deng famously lunged across the table to strike the attacker, and Murdoch delivered his statement that it was the most humble day of his life. Committee members pressed both Murdochs on what they knew and when. Both claimed ignorance of the systematic nature of the hacking. Rupert Murdoch’s performance was widely described as that of a frail elderly man struggling to recall basic facts about his own organization, a presentation that many observers found difficult to reconcile with his decades-long reputation as one of the most hands-on and detail-oriented media executives in the world. The Leveson Inquiry ran in parallel with the criminal proceedings and produced a comprehensive examination of the relationship between the British press and public life. Lord Justice Leveson’s report documented in forensic detail how Murdoch’s executives had cultivated relationships with police, politicians, and public officials through a combination of favors, threats, and the implied power of the News International papers to make or destroy careers and reputations. The inquiry established that News International had operated what amounted to a shadow influence operation over British public life for decades, with politicians from all major parties competing for Murdoch’s favor and modifying their policy positions accordingly. Tony Blair’s government approved a media ownership acquisition by News Corp that critics argued was directly connected to the Sun’s electoral support. David Cameron hired Andy Coulson as his communications chief despite warnings about Coulson’s involvement in phone hacking, a decision that led directly to a convicted criminal operating at the heart of the British government.
Now bring Ian Osborne back into this picture because this is where the Epstein connection becomes most revealing. The Epstein files document in EFTA01108051 that Osborne and Partners was managing confidential PR strategy for Rupert Murdoch personally during the phone hacking crisis. This means that at the precise moment Murdoch’s organization was under criminal investigation, facing parliamentary inquiry, and managing the most serious reputational crisis in its history, the man Murdoch turned to for confidential strategic counsel was Ian Osborne, who was simultaneously structuring Jeffrey Epstein’s investment empire, transmitting Steve Hilton’s access requests through Epstein’s network, and building the relationships across British government, Silicon Valley, and global finance that made him the most important fixer in elite circles that nobody outside those circles had ever heard of. Osborne was also separately documented in the files as managing PR for Murdoch’s son-in-law through a related entity at the same time. The significance of this for your research is profound. Murdoch did not hire a conventional crisis PR firm to manage the most serious criminal scandal of his career. He hired a man who was embedded in Jeffrey Epstein’s operational network and who had simultaneous access to Downing Street, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Nobel Peace Prize committee. That choice tells you something important about how Murdoch views the world and who he trusts when his back is against the wall. Now consider Steve Hilton’s specific relationship with Murdoch and what it reveals about the transaction currently underway in the California governor’s race. Hilton did not stumble into a relationship with Murdoch accidentally. He was hired by Fox News in 2017 and given his own primetime show The Next Revolution, a platform that reached millions of American conservatives every week and that Hilton used to build the national political brand he is now deploying in California.
Fox News does not give primetime shows to people it has not thoroughly vetted and whose political utility it has not carefully assessed. Murdoch’s organization chose Hilton deliberately, shaped his public identity deliberately, and is now funding his political campaign deliberately. This is not a donor relationship. This is a years-long investment in a political asset. Hilton spent six years inside Murdoch’s media infrastructure learning exactly what messages resonate with conservative audiences, exactly how to frame economic grievance in ways that protect the donor class while appearing to challenge it, and exactly how to use the Fox News brand as a political launching pad. Everything about Hilton’s California campaign, its messaging, its media strategy, its fundraising network, and its policy platform, bears the fingerprints of the organization that incubated it. When Murdoch writes a check to Hilton’s governor campaign he is not making a charitable contribution to a candidate he admires. He is activating an asset he has spent years and significant resources developing. The historical pattern of what Murdoch extracts from politicians he has invested in is documented across five decades and three countries and it is consistent without exception.
In Australia Murdoch’s papers supported politicians who weakened media ownership regulations that would have constrained his expansion. In the United Kingdom his papers supported politicians who approved News Corp acquisitions, blocked public broadcasting funding that would have competed with his properties, and suppressed investigations into his organization’s criminal conduct. In the United States Fox News has spent three decades shaping Republican politics toward culture war framing specifically designed to protect the regulatory and tax environment that has allowed Murdoch’s empire to grow unchallenged.
The Dominion case revealed that Fox News executives knew they were broadcasting election fraud lies and chose to continue because losing their audience to more extreme competitors was a greater business threat than the damage to democratic institutions. Murdoch’s testimony in that case established that he had the power to stop the lies and chose not to exercise it. What Murdoch wants from a California governor is specific and historically consistent. He wants protection for consolidated media ownership at the state level, which means no support for legislation that would break up large media conglomerates or restore localism requirements in broadcasting.
He wants a hostile regulatory environment for public media and independent journalism that competes with his properties. He wants a communications infrastructure in Sacramento modeled on the Fox News relationship between political power and media empire, where the governor’s office provides favorable access, exclusive interviews, and coordinated messaging to Murdoch’s outlets in exchange for favorable coverage. He wants a governor who will not support shield law reforms that protect journalists investigating powerful institutions from legal harassment, because Murdoch’s organization has used legal harassment of journalists as a competitive weapon for decades. And he wants a governor who will use the California bully pulpit to amplify the Fox News political framework to the largest state audience in America at a moment when Fox’s national influence is under pressure from the Dominion settlement fallout and the fragmentation of conservative media. California is not just another state for Murdoch.
It is the largest media market in the country, the home of Hollywood which he has spent decades trying to control through 20th Century Fox and its successors, and the state whose regulatory decisions on media ownership, broadband infrastructure, and digital platform accountability set national precedents that affect his global business interests. A Murdoch-funded governor of California is not a local political investment. It is a strategic acquisition of influence over the regulatory and political environment of the most consequential state in the American media landscape. Steve Hilton is the product Murdoch built, the candidate Murdoch is funding, and if California voters do not ask what Murdoch expects in return before June 2nd, they will spend the next four years watching a governor deliver the answers from Sacramento.
