EXCLUSIVE: Your Guide to Epstein and Intelligence
There’s a dire lack of nonpartisan expert counterintelligence analysis of the Epstein network: So here it is
What a difference a couple days makes. Late last week at the Washington Examiner, I dissected the White House’s bizarre, nearly inexplicable mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. How exactly the second administration of President Donald Trump tied itself in its own knots over the sordid Epstein affair, six years after the wealthy sex criminal’s death, by grandly promising a full reveal, then claiming that there in fact was nothing to reveal, will be something future historians must ponder. For now, this is simply a Trump own-goal of gargantuan proportions.
Somehow, President Trump then made things worse by posting a rant for the ages at Truth Social, his own social media platform, on Saturday that, even for Trump, was unhinged and meandering. It stated, among many things, that the MAGA faithful must move on from the Epstein scandal, “something that nobody cares about,” adding: “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.” Trump then added a novel spin, that there is no Epstein scandal at all, but if there is, the Democrats caused it: “They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.”
In unprecedented fashion, Trump experienced significant push-back from the MAGA faithful, with his post getting “ratioed” by skeptics among Trump’s fans (nobody else uses Truth Social). Trump’s efforts to move on from his self-created Epstein debacle aren’t working. The president has birthed a needless scandal that will never go away. FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino made noises over the weekend that they were pondering resigning over the Epstein mess, since they purportedly disagreed with AG Bondi, but such talk has faded with the new week. Team Trump intends to circle the wagons and ride out this bizarre scandal, no matter the cost.
To recap, the Epstein story is complex and ugly, with lots of VIPs from around the world reputedly involved in plentiful sex crimes and trafficking, including of minors, but its essence boils down to two key questions:
- Where did Epstein get his money?
- Who was he working for?
The first question in its details is best left to forensic accountants, but it must be explained how a college dropout schoolteacher transformed into a very wealthy man seemingly on the basis of personal connections alone. My view has long been that Epstein’s sole known client, the fashion magnate Les Wexner, seems unlikely to be the only source of Epstein’s prodigious wealth. Multiple mansions, private jetliners, limitless free time, the full billionaire package, cost a great deal to maintain, and we know that Epstein left no footprint on Wall Street, and had in fact relinquished his broker’s license in the 1980s. Whatever Epstein was doing, it wasn’t high finance.
Answering the second question, which falls in my counterintelligence wheelhouse, doubtless sheds light on the first one. It’s centered on the stunning revelation in 2019 by then-Labor Secretary Alex Acosta that back in 2008, when Acosta was the U.S. Attorney for South Florida, he signed off on Epstein’s shockingly lenient plea deal for sex crimes against minors because Justice Department higher-ups in Washington wanted him to go easy because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Having said the unsayable, Acosta soon resigned from Trump’s first cabinet under a cloud.
Acosta’s admission was a game-changing event, as I reported in July 2019 when the news broke, in a deep-dive for the New York Observer titled “It Sure Looks Like Jeffrey Epstein was a Spy – But Whose?” Based on my real-world counterintelligence experience, my initial conclusion was that, while U.S. intelligence had to be aware of Epstein’s crimes perpetrated on American soil, against American victims, to some degree, it was unlikely that U.S. intelligence – think FBI and CIA – were Epstein’s main partners and benefactors. Instead, foreign intelligence services were the likely culprits, probably more than one. Israel was unavoidably the lead suspect, given Epstein’s close ties to that country, through Russia’s “special services” made the short list too. As I concluded my analysis, “What’s not in doubt is that a sex trafficking ring centered on minors, which involved numerous global VIPs in compromising situations, would be of high interest to quite a few intelligence services. The Epstein saga seems certain to get even more unpleasant and interesting.”
That it certainly did. However, from the start, the Epstein story, which only got stranger with the suspect’s death in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019, under unexplained circumstances, was too big for the media to touch. It was all too much, with its pervert VIPs, including presidents and princes, sordid sexual perversions, vast sums of somebody’s money, plus international intrigue amid hints of espionage. If some banks are too big to fail, the Epstein story was too big to cover seriously for the mainstream media, which instead focused on human interest aspects such as his victims, while avoiding tough questions, especially those two key questions I mentioned.
There’s simply no mileage for American media asking difficult questions about Israel. As a lifelong Zionist and supporter of the Jewish state it pains me to say this, but few encouraged serious examination of who Epstein was really working for. Despite the fact that the dead pedophile’s connections to Israel were obvious. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s bestie and victim-procurer, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a British publishing executive and high-level MOSSAD agent (more on him shortly), while Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and top general, spent so much time with Epstein, including whole months at a go, that even the Israeli government found it embarrassing. Merely applying Occam’s Razor, without benefit of highly classified intelligence, Israel had to be the lead suspect in any examination of Epstein’s foreign connections.
Few in Washington, DC, seek to expose Israel’s sometimes unpleasant activities, due to the power of the Israeli lobby in our nation’s capital. If you ask questions, you will be accused of anti-Semitism from those vocal quarters, as I was on social media back in 2019 for suggesting that Epstein was mixed up with Israel. It’s never career-enhancing, and can be career-ending, to openly discuss such things, but given my background in counterintelligence I had a different perspective than most Americans do. Indeed, the counterspy trade is pretty much the only place in Washington where you can enjoy a fair and balanced discussion about Israel. The difficult reality is that Israel is a U.S. friend and ally, a close intelligence and security partner, indeed a linchpin of Central Command’s strategy in the Middle East, while also representing a top espionage threat to the United States. There’s no other country quite like this in terms of American foreign policy. Moreover, Israel’s loud cheering section in Washington and beyond will make life difficult for anyone who asks what’s going on with all this.
As a result, few were willing to seriously ask what Epstein’s relationship was with Israel. Most inquirers have been cranks, conspiracists, and bona fide anti-Semites, who got interested in Epstein only because they hated Jews. Such fringe-theorizing is easy for the powers that be to dismiss, so they have. However, the second Trump administration’s astonishingly inept showcasing of the Epstein scandal, only to attempt to smother it, has opened the floodgates, and now a Republican commentator of stature has said the unsayable, thereby changing the debate.
To the surprise of nobody who knows Trump World, the renegade who kicked down the Epstein-and-Israel door was Tucker Carlson, who until a few years ago was the top Republican pundit in the country. However, Carlson seemed to lose his mind in the summer of 2021 when he claimed that the National Security Agency was spying on him and possibly plotting to kill him. This newsletter covered that strange outburst in detail, including NSA’s unprecedented public denial that it was doing anything nefarious regarding Carlson, yet the incident seemed to send the top Fox News talker into a spiral. FNC let him go in 2023, and since then Carlson has spoken his mind, which has included paeans to Vladimir Putin’s Russia and more recently praise for Qatar and its exotic policies. In other words, Carlson has turned into a crank.
However, cranks sometimes utter truths which others dare not, and that’s what happened last Friday in Tampa, at the Turning Point USA summit, a MAGA headliner event, where Carlson unloaded both barrels into the Epstein narrative being proffered by the White House. In a devastating rant which is worth watching, Carlson implicitly accused President Trump of involvement in the continuing Epstein cover-up, especially of the fact that Epstein was working for Israel, probably for MOSSAD, which Carlson claimed “everybody knows” in our nation’s capital, but which almost everyone is afraid to state publicly. Carlson just did and, perhaps more important, the TPUSA crowd cheered as he pointed the finger at Israel in the Epstein affair.
On cue, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett today posted on X (formerly Twitter) a carefully worded denial, including that the “accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.” He added a menacing jab at Carlson, “There’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won’t take it anymore.” Therefore, Carlson punched back at Bennett: “Instead of issuing threats on social media, why don’t you sit down for a rational interview on Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to the Israeli government? We’ll reach out to your office this morning.” I doubt Bennett will take Carlson’s offer, yet regardless the debate over Epstein’s foreign ties has shifted since Friday.
What do we actually know about Epstein’s relationships with intelligence agencies? Regrettably, scant new information has come to light in the last few years, while the Trump administration’s shutdown of discussion of the topic means we shouldn’t expect revelations from Washington anytime soon. However, Top Secret Umbra has published several pieces of extended counterintelligence analysis regarding the Epstein saga, and they stand as the main unclassified body of professional work on the subject. Let them be your starting point for informed discussion, pending new information coming to light.
In July 2020, this newsletter published “The Epstein Mystery Deepens,” which asked five big questions about the affair, none of which have been answered five years later. In November of that year, TSU ran two linked pieces, “Epstein and Intelligence” plus “The Epstein Spy Cover-Up Continues,” which made plain that the Justice Department was wholly unwilling to elaborate on Acosta’s “belonged to intelligence” remark, indicating that there’s something worth hiding there. Again, nothing has changed since. Joe Biden’s DoJ kept mum for four years on this matter, while Trump’s DoJ is presently continuing their first-term cover-up in the Epstein affair.
In August 2021, TSU published a counterintelligence analysis deep dive, “The Epstein Scandal and Intelligence: An Update,” based on high-ranking KGB insider accounts of Robert Maxwell, the publishing mogul and bona fide international man of mystery. For decades, Maxwell was close with MOSSAD, but also with the KGB, both of which handled their high-flying agent in bespoke fashion. British intelligence, especially the Security Service (popularly termed MI5) enjoyed an intermittent relationship with Maxwell, while they were aware of his clandestine ties to the Soviet Union and Israel. Down to his mysterious 1991 death by falling off his yacht, which many suspect was murder, Maxwell played all sides. His daughter Ghislaine then fled to New York, into the arms of Jeffrey Epstein, in fear for her own life. Since Robert Maxwell became Epstein’s de facto son-in-law, Epstein’s sexspionage network should be considered a successor to Maxwell’s secret activities.
In January 2022, this newsletter ran “Epstein Wasn’t an Isolated Incident,” drawing an analogy between Epstein’s sex abuse and trafficking operation and the infamous Franklin Scandal of the 1980s, which has been largely forgotten, as the perpetrators wished, but which involved nationwide child sexual abuse rings ranging from the Midwest to Washington, DC. The muckraking journalist and victims’ advocate Nick Bryant convincingly exposed the Franklin Scandal and tried hard to garner media interest in Epstein too, years before that was politically possible.
Jeffrey Epstein had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, many of whom had nothing to do with his sex crimes. Everybody who associated with Epstein before his 2008 plea deal gets a putative pass, barring evidence of their involvement in crimes, while anyone who decided to hang out with him thereafter knew they were palling around with a convicted pedophile and should get no pass at all. Appallingly, one of the latter group turned out to be Bill Burns, one of America’s top diplomats who served as CIA director under President Biden. Back in 2014, Burns met twice with Epstein, ostensibly to obtain career advice, as I exposed in “The CIA Director Has Got to Go” in May 2023. Burns didn’t go anywhere, while neither he nor the Biden White House felt compelled to offer any explanation why Burns visited a convicted sex criminal for career counseling.
Last, in January 2024, TSU published a detailed assessment titled “MEGA, NSA, and the Ugly Truth About the Epstein Sexpionage Network,” which employed discussion of a late 1990s fruitless NSA molehunt for a suspected MOSSAD penetration of the Bill Clinton White House to illuminate the vexing role played by Les Wexner and other Jewish billionaires behind the Epstein network. This counterintelligence conundrum, once explained, leaves little doubt that Israel and its friends constituted the secret force – though likely not the only one – looming behind Epstein’s criminal kompromat operation. As it concludes: “We know that MEGA was viewed by Israel intelligence officials as a vehicle for espionage and influence operations in the United States. We know that it was co-founded by Jeffrey Epstein’s billionaire benefactor. The rest remains speculation. Nevertheless, if any intrepid investigative reporters want to seriously investigate the Epstein network – or any members of Congress work up the courage to ask about this – the place to start is Les Wexner and MEGA.”
That place remains. Until new information comes to light, any impartial expert counterintelligence examination of the Epstein network concludes that Israeli interests played a key role in that sordid clandestine operation, though hardly the only one. It’s imperative for Congress to ask what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about Epstein’s illegal activities being conducted on American soil, and when they knew it. Alas, I’m not holding my breath, dear reader, and neither should you.
