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.
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