The case of wealthy sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in custody in 2019, has left a lot of unresolved mysteries that demand answers. As I’ve argued, contrary to popular expectations, there probably is no “Epstein List” waiting to be revealed. Many critics understood that to mean that there’s nothing more to see.
In fact, I meant the opposite. Rather than a single binder in the FBI archive outlining the whole story, there were probably scattered scraps of information on Epstein and his connections, which demanded effort to be pieced together. A few months ago, I stumbled upon one of those scraps: the leaked email inbox of Epstein’s former business partner, retired Israeli Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak.
Reason just published my investigation into the leaked emails. All of them come from mid-2010s, after Epstein’s sex trafficking operation had been shut down, when Epstein was trying to branch out into other lines of work. And indeed he did. In his attempts to break into the defense and surveillance industries, Epstein connected with security elites from America, Russia, Israel, and possibly even China…
I really recommend reading the story at Reason. Since my article came out, a few other journalists have covered the email trove. One of the emails, regarding Britain’s Prince Andrew, made the front page of the Sunday Times. (It includes the cryptic sentence, “weathy chines looking for to start personel protection co in beijing, kidnapping has begun”) Straight Arrow News has also been really diligent about digging through. And I joined the TrueAnon podcast — which often insists that they are comedians, not journalists — to discuss the story more in depth.
To be clear, the emails don’t show that Barak was Epstein’s Israeli intelligence handler, as Tucker Carlson insinuated a few months ago. Instead, they show Epstein using Barak to make connections and seek out investment opportunities. Of course, these business opportunities include some pretty spooky stuff, politically sensitive technologies useful for spying.
These emails came from Distributed Denial of Secrets, which obtained them from Handala, a hacker group that targeted several former Israeli officials’ inboxes. They were originally shared exclusively with a select group of journalists and researchers. A few hours after my article was published, Distributed Denial of Secrets published the Handala trove in its entirety.
The leak demonstrates how much more there is to see in the “Epstein files,” which are much bigger than just the infamous case file at the Department of Justice. His contacts with Barak are likely only a small slice of Epstein’s activities in this time frame. And investigators are demanding to see more.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D—Ore.) is calling on the authorities to follow up on “thousands of wire transfers and more than $1 billion dollars flowing in and out of Epstein’s accounts” contained in U.S. Treasury records and to “subpoena internal bank records” from private companies.
The House Oversight Committee sent a subpoena to the Epstein estate for a variety of documents, including communications, bank records, calendars, home surveillance footage, and the infamous birthday book reportedly containing a letter from President Donald Trump. The existence of that book turned out to be key to verifying that the Barak emails were real, by the way.
While we wait for that information, go read my Reason reporting. It’s really worthwhile. This case is not going to go away. And sex crimes are not the only thing that digging into Epstein’s networks can reveal.