Demonstrators hold signs aloft protesting Jeffrey Epstein, as he awaits arraignment in the Southern District of New York on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, in New York, July 8, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo)
Over the past two weeks, thousands of un-redacted pages of court documents pertaining to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have been released, in accordance with an order by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska.
The documents come from a defamation lawsuit filed by accuser Virginia Giuffre against Epstein’s right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for the sex trafficking of a minor, among other crimes. Many underage girls, including at least one girl as young as 14, were recruited by Epstein and Maxwell ostensibly for massage work. These “massages” of high-profile figures, however, would often lead to criminal sexual abuse, and these girls would often be trafficked to powerful men from around the world.
While Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit was settled in 2017, only now have the documents been unsealed, revealing previously-redacted names.
While some public figures not previously linked to Epstein were named in the documents—such as David Copperfield, Michael Jackson, and Stephen Hawking—most of the names were already known associates of Epstein.
Former President Donald Trump is also named in the documents, though the accuser soon retracted her claims. Trump was apparently friendly with Epstein until 2007, when Trump banned him from his Mar-a-Lago club after Epstein “harassed the daughter of a member.”
Though not many new names of Epstein’s associates came to light through the newly unsealed documents, the documents do further confirm Epstein’s extensive connections among the world’s political elite. They also argue that Epstein was collecting potential “blackmail” on influential men, and was being protected by the U.S. government.
Among the many named in the unsealed documents is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, whose close ties to Epstein have been previously publicized.
Though not mentioned by any of Epstein’s accusers in the newly unsealed documents, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak also had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, which continued long past Epstein’s 2008 conviction of procuring a minor for prostitution.
Concerned citizens should ask themselves:
1. Why did so many powerful political figures have such close relationships to Epstein and Maxwell?
2. How did Epstein and Maxwell get away with their international sex-trafficking ring for so long?
3. Why has Epstein and Maxwell’s client list never been made public, and why aren’t their clients behind bars?
Epstein’s ties to Bill Clinton
Among the many prominent political figures with whom Epstein associated, perhaps foremost among them is former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg says in the newly-unsealed documents that Epstein told her “that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.”
Though Clinton has not personally been the subject of any criminal proceedings in relation to Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes, his close ties to Epstein and Maxwell have been well documented, as investigative journalist Whitney Webb, among others, has covered.
From 1993-1995, under Clinton’s administration, Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times.
Seven of these visits were personally authorized by Mark Middleton, whose death, like Epstein’s, was officially ruled a suicide. Also like Epstein’s death, the mysterious circumstances surrounding Middleton’s death have led to a widespread public belief that he was murdered.
On May 7, 2022, Middleton was found hanging by an extension cord from a tree with a shotgun blast to the chest, about six months after the Daily Mail revealed Middleton’s involvement in Epstein’s White House visits. A local judge blocked from public release all photographs, videos, and police sketches from the official investigation into Middleton’s death.
Epstein and Clinton’s friendship extended far beyond the White House visits, however.
According to flight logs, Clinton flew on Epstein’s private plane at least 26 times in the early 2000s after leaving office.
Epstein’s relationship with Clinton also led to the founding of an organization that would go on to significantly affect global politics. According to a 2007 letter written by Epstein’s lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt, “Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project ‘bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.”
According to Unlimited Hangout, Epstein’s confidant Ghislaine Maxwell was “associated with the Clinton Global Initiative at least up until 2013.”
Maxwell also attended the 2010 wedding of Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea.
Epstein’s relationship with Clinton is illustrative of his success in ingratiating himself with some of the highest circles of international politics. Indeed, Bill Clinton is not the only world leader who has publicly associated with Epstein.
Epstein’s ties to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Israel
For many years, Epstein had a close relationship to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister. Barak has admitted to having met Epstein in the early 2000s, and maintained the relationship at least until 2017.
Epstein, who was born to two Jewish parents, even funded an Israeli technology startup with Barak as recently as 2015. According to reports, Barak met with Epstein around 30 times between 2013 and 2017.
In a 2019 interview with the Daily Beast, Barak said that “the man who introduced me to Epstein about 17 years ago was Shimon Peres.”
Peres, who passed away in 2016, had served as both prime minister and president of Israel.
Barak said that at the gathering in which Peres introduced him to Epstein, “there were many famous and important people, including, if I recall, both Clintons and hundreds of others.”
Barak also admitted to having visited Epstein’s private island “once, for several hours—and years after the publications about sex parties or orgies there.” He denies having engaged in any illicit activity with Epstein, and has said that “I never met Epstein in the company of women or young girls.”
He also noted to the Daily Beast that he was only one of many high-profile figures who spent time with Epstein: “At his home, I met many very respected people, scientists, Nobel Prize winners, and I met him also in Boston, at MIT or the Harvard labs he supports.”
Epstein’s connections to at least two former Israeli prime ministers (Peres and Barak) are not his only links to Israel.
Epstein’s confidant and fellow sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, an influential Jewish businessman who, according to a 2003 Telegraph article, had “known links with MI6, the KGB and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.”
Like Epstein, Robert Maxwell died under mysterious circumstances, having apparently fallen off his yacht (“the Lady Ghislaine”) in 1991. In a 1997 interview with Hello! Magazine, his daughter Ghislaine (after whom the yacht was named), declared the following: “One thing I am sure about is that he did not commit suicide. I think he was murdered.”
Robert Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. As the Times of Israel has described it, the funeral took place “in the presence of numerous Israeli intelligence figures, and [was] eulogized by then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Amid reports of his links to Britain’s MI6 intelligence, the KGB and Mossad, Shamir declared that Maxwell ‘has done more for Israel than can today be said.’”
Epstein’s apparent ties to the intelligence community
It is not merely Robert Maxwell’s reported (though disputed) intelligence ties that have led many to believe that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were themselves carrying out a blackmail operation on behalf of one or more governments.
The documents from the Giuffre defamation lawsuit claim that Epstein engaged in his trafficking activities at least in part to “potentially blackmail” powerful men. They also say that though “even a rudimentary investigation” would have uncovered this international sex trafficking operation, such an investigation could not go forward, because the “Government secretly negotiated a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein.”
Alexander Acosta—who served as Secretary of Labor during the Trump Administration until his 2019 resignation—was the U.S. attorney who signed off on this federal non-prosecution agreement in 2008. Explaining his reasons for doing so, Acosta reportedly said the following: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
Though Epstein was publicly a financier, who certainly had significant sums of money at his disposal, many around him believed his work was not limited to civilian affairs. In fact, rumors of Epstein’s ties to the intelligence community have circled for decades.
As far back as 1992, an article published in the Mail on Sunday says of Epstein that “one outrageous story links him to the CIA and Mossad.”
A Sunday Times article published in 2000 quoted “a New York social observer” as saying the following of Epstein: “He’s Mr. Enigmatic. Nobody knows whether he’s a concert pianist, property developer, a CIA agent, a math teacher or a member of Mossad.”
A 2001 article for the Evening Standard said that Epstein “once claimed to have worked for the CIA although he now denies it.”
Ari Ben-Menashe, who formerly worked for Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, claimed in 2019 that Epstein and Maxwell “worked directly with military intelligence” and “were blackmailing American and other political figures” on behalf of the Israeli government.
In 2019, about a month after Epstein’s death in prison, Ghislaine Maxwell was seen at a California In-n-Out reading “The Book of Honor: the Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA operatives,” according to the New York Post.
Both Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s only brother Mark have publicly stated their belief that he was murdered in prison—something that could likely only have occurred with the involvement of U.S. intelligence.
In addition to these signals, the lack of action of the U.S. government against Epstein and Maxwell’s clients has undermined much of the American public’s trust in their intelligence agencies.
The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that at Epstein’s NY mansion, photographs were found of what “appear to be underage girls,” and that some photographs “were discovered in a locked safe, in which law enforcement officers also found compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: ‘Young [Name] + [Name],’ ‘Misc nudes 1,’ and ‘Girl pics nude.’”
As a report from the Telegraph details, “boxes of CDs and hard drives” were taken from Epstein’s NY mansion by the FBI, as well as a “shelf full of large black binders” which “held CDs, carefully categorized in plastic slipcovers and thumbnails with photos on them.”
It is unclear as to whether blackmail material was uncovered, or what the FBI has done with these CDs and hard drives.
Many concerned American citizens have therefore called upon the FBI—as well any other intelligence agency that may have knowledge of the matter—to release the full truth about what it knows regarding the clients of Epstein and Maxwell’s international sex-trafficking operation.
While the extent of Epstein and Maxwell’s intelligence ties are not publicly known, two facts are clear: the U.S. federal government failed to go after Epstein and Maxwell for decades, and is failing to go after their clients now.
Cindy McCain, wife of the late U.S. Senator John McCain, said the following of Epstein in a 2020 Q&A on human trafficking: “Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing. But we had no one that was—no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.”
If Epstein was not being protected by the intelligence community, why was every “legal aspect” so afraid of him for so long? And why are they not going after his clients now?
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