4 people who have seen the Epstein files say nothing suggests he was a spy

Business Insider

Four people who had access to the records seized by the FBI say they found nothing to indicate that Epstein had any role with US or foreign intelligence.

Transcript

00:00I've spoken to four people who've seen the Epstein files and they told me there's nothing in them

00:04that suggests he was a spy. So the people who I spoke to who've seen the Epstein files said that

00:09there is nothing in there that relates to any intelligence agency. There's nothing in there

00:13that is related to some kind of national secret or be classified or that intelligence agencies

00:17would even be interested in very much. Which of course raises the question of why is it that the

00:23government doesn't release the Epstein files to the public. There are some other sort of key details.

00:27For example, Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, this British media

00:33baron who was seen to be close to the Mossad and MI6 and other intelligence agencies. Epstein was

00:38friends with Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, who led a military intelligence agency.

00:43Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of these connections in politics and media and it does seem like some of

00:48his friends had connections with intelligence agencies. But just because there's a lot of

00:51smoke does not mean that there's fire. So another strong piece of evidence against the idea that

00:56Jeffrey Epstein had intelligence ties is that he didn't bring it up. And that sounds counterintuitive,

01:00but actually a lot of criminal defense lawyers I talked to say that if they have a client who

01:04cooperated with the government, that they would use that as a bargaining chip, right? If you're charged

01:08with sex trafficking, you want to make sure that you can go to the government and be like,

01:12hey, please go easy on me. I helped you out once. Jeffrey Epstein was criminally investigated twice,

01:17and in neither case did he bring up this defense that he did intelligence work. In one of the cases,

01:22one of his lawyers told me that he asked Epstein about it and Epstein straight up denied any

01:26involvement with intelligence agencies. A lot of this belief goes back to a quote attributed to

01:30Alex Acosta. He's the prosecutor who oversaw Epstein's case in Florida years ago. There's a story out

01:36there that when Acosta was being interviewed for the Trump administration role, he was asked about

01:41the Jeffrey Epstein case and he said that Epstein belonged to intelligence and he was told to back off.

01:45Years later, the Justice Department investigated this claim and they discovered that Acosta screwed up,

01:50but they asked him point blank, was there any intelligence connection there? And he said no.

01:55This answer was buried in page 169 of a 350-page report that no one read. So a few weeks ago,

02:02the Justice Department and the FBI issued a memo announcing that they would no longer release any

02:06more files. They've only released three new pages from the many, many volumes of evidence they collected.

02:11And now they say that, you know, we've looked into it. It's not really clear why this is. A lot of

02:15people have speculated it has to do with President Trump's own relationship with Jeffrey Epstein because

02:19they're friends back in the 1990s, but there haven't been any credible accusations against

02:23Trump in relation to Jeffrey Epstein. There's still some ways that we could see part of the Epstein

02:27files. There's some congressional committees that have issued subpoenas to the Justice Department

02:31asking for some of these records. If there really aren't any big national secrets or nothing classified

02:36in these files, it really raises the question of why the government will release them right now.

02:41They have in their possession and they could make it public. We can see for ourselves what's in

02:44there and what's not. If you want to read more of our coverage of the Epstein files, head to

02:48businessinsider.com.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended