Latest Epstein document dump is one more cover-up

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Latest Epstein document dump is one more cover-up
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel on Epstein’s private jet, known as the Lolita Express. Both Epstein and Brunel were found dead by hanging in their prison cells. DoJ/MEGA

The glaring absences in the latest dump of Epstein files from the US Department of Justice reveal more about the federal investigation and its cover-up than the 3 million-plus pages released.

By Jim DeBrosse, Reposted from Electronic Intifada, February 20, 2026

The glaring absences in the latest dump of Epstein files from the US Department of Justice reveal more about the federal investigation and its cover-up than the 3 million-plus pages released.

Search the files for “Epstein and Mossad.” No results.

Search for “Epstein and Israel.” No results.

Search for “Ghislaine Maxwell and Mossad.” No results

Search for “Ghislaine Maxwell and Israel.” No results.

Ditto when searching the terms “Mossad” or “Israel” with the names of Ghislaine’s father, media mogul and reputed Mossad asset Robert Maxwell; or Epstein’s close associate, former Israeli prime minister and military intelligence official Ehud Barak; or Epstein’s chief financial backer, retail magnate Les Wexner of Victoria Secret’s fame, who has donated millions to Israeli-related causes.

What’s mostly in the data dump are millions of frustrating blackouts, boring dross, needless repetition and the occasional titillating distraction. Little, if anything, of investigative substance can be searched and found. Under the direction of US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now his second-in-command at the justice department, the FBI’s internal memos and analyses were withheld in defiance of congressional orders.

Journalists, historians and the curious public are left to sift through the masses of unfiltered data looking for dribs and drabs that might expand or deepen the list of names guilty by association but never address the key questions of why a pedophile financier would have 1) so many connections among the rich, respected and powerful; 2) so many contacts in the intelligence world, particularly with Israel’s Mossad but also US and Russian networks and; 3) so many surveillance cameras hidden in his mansions and resorts.

Here are a few of the tasty but unsatisfying tidbits from the latest release.

In a 2019 email to the Cleveland office of the FBI, someone in Israel named Erez Zadok wrote that “in 2001, Mr. Epstein transferred approximately $9 million to the Wexner Foundation. During the years 2004-2006, the Wexner Foundation transferred at least 2.3 million USD to the Israeli former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Mr. Epstein signed personally on [a] few of the transfers’ forms.”

Donors and lawyers

Email between Jeffrey Epstein and a secretary to private equity billionaire Leon Black show that, in 2014, Isaac Herzog, then head of Israel’s opposition Labor party, the former party of Ehud Barak, visited Epstein’s infamous Little Saint James island.

Today Herzog is president of Israel.

Black, also an Epstein associate, has been one of Herzog’s biggest political donors.

Epstein also wrote but never sent an undated letter to Les Wexner in an attempt to rekindle the financial partnership Wexner broke off in 2007 after sexual abuse allegations surfaced against Epstein in Florida. “You and I had ‘gang stuff’ for over 15 years,” Epstein wrote, noting that “I owe a great debt to you, as frankly you owe to me,” adding that he had “no intention of divulging any confidence of ours.”

 

A 2020 FBI report states that Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer who befriended and represented Epstein, told a Confidential Human Source (CHS) that “if he were young again, he would be holding a stun gun as an Israeli Intelligence (Mossad) agent. CHS believed Dershowitz was co-opted by Mossad and subscribed to their mission. CHS still continues to communicate occasionally for Dershowitz.”

The same FBI report goes on to say that Epstein “was represented by Dershowitz. CHS remembered Dershowitz tell Alex Ocasta [sic – Acosta] (US Attorney of Southern District of Florida at the time) that Epstein belonged to both US and allied intelligence services. CHS shared phone calls between Dershowitz and Epstein during which he/she took notes. After these calls, Mossad would then call Dershowitz to debrief.”

An Epstein associate named Greg Brown, meanwhile, pitched plans to Epstein in a 2011 email for tapping into Libya’s $32.4 billion in frozen assets held in the US, alluding to the possible help of former British and Israeli intelligence officials.

A 2016 email from Hyatt Hotel billionaire and Israel investor Tom Pritzker to Epstein mentions an article in the Israeli press alleging that James Comey sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign as revenge for President Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich. Comey had successfully prosecuted Rich for diverting sanctioned Iranian oil to Israel, but Israel – under Ehud Barak – reportedly wanted him pardoned because he had “done work for Mossad.”

Because the Epstein files showed his long association with Epstein, Tom Pritzker, a cousin of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, stepped down on 17 February after more than 20 years as executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels.

Poetic justice

In 2001, after the 11 September attacks, Ghislaine Maxwell emailed a strange piece of poetry to French modeling scout and Epstein accomplice Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found hanged in a French jail in 2022 while facing charges of drugging and raping underage girls. The poem, which she also sent to a number of other people, including Pritzker, fantasizes about a future America – or world – where Arabs no longer exist.

A search of the justice department’s Epstein library for the term “Mossad” by itself produces some 170 files, only one of which is from the meatier DataSets 1-8, containing the bulk of the investigative material, including FBI “302” reports with witness and subject interview summaries, Palm Beach police reports from the initial 2005–2008 investigation and legal correspondence

That single Dataset 8 file happens to be a 2019 email between sociologist Melvyn Kohn and Epstein’s brother Mark decrying the “anti Jewish” conspiracy theorists who claim that Jeffrey Epstein was working for Mossad.

Kohn acknowledges that “while Jeffrey would never do anything that he knew would hurt other Jews, he has left lots for anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists to use.”

The remaining 172 documents that mention “Mossad” are culled from the less notable DOJ DataSets 9-12, described as “High-Value Communication” – private emails, visual and forensic media, supplemental materials and miscellaneous files and court documents.

Whoopee!

The absence of Israel-Mossad cross-referenced files for Epstein, the Maxwells, Barak and Wexner is laughably absurd. Barak served as Israel’s head of military intelligence, its minister of defense and its prime minister. He’s the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli military.

Current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has emphatically denied that Epstein had any ties with his country’s spy agencies. Recently he posted to X claiming that “Jeffrey Epstein’s unusual close relationship with Ehud Barak doesn’t suggest Epstein worked for Israel” and that Barak had been “working with the anti-Zionist radical left” to undermine him as prime minister.

The Israeli embassy in the US had security cameras installed at an Epstein-managed apartment building in New York where Barak frequently stayed. Officials at Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations were in regular contact with Epstein’s staff to coordinate security at a building reportedly used by young models contracted by Brunel’s modelling agency.

[Robert Maxwell’s service to Mossad and Israel](https://electronicintifada.net/content/judge-palestine-action-case-has-t… has been the topic of at least five books and hundreds of investigative articles.

When he drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991, Maxwell was honored with a burial on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives – formally occupied territory – attended by the most senior Israeli politicians of the day, including the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and president, Chaim Herzog.

Israel links

After Maxwell’s death, Epstein ingratiated himself with members of the Maxwell family who had been left bankrupt and riddled with debt, according to Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter whose doggedness kept the Epstein story alive following his sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors in 2007.

Epstein may have offered financial assistance to Robert Maxwell’s widow Elisabeth, Brown said. And if anyone knew of the many secrets her father took to the grave related to his life in politics, finance and espionage, she noted, it’s his daughter Ghislaine.

Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking in a cushy prison camp in Texas, was Robert Maxwell’s favorite child. Indeed, the yacht from which the newspaper mogul fell to his death under mysterious circumstances in 1991 is named the Lady Ghislaine.

Epstein and his mystery millions in assets came to the family’s rescue, and Ghislaine became Epstein’s closest jet-setting partner and chief collaborator in his sex-trafficking operation. She had the primary job of luring the underage teens he needed for his own sexual proclivities and perhaps for many of the Western political leaders, billionaires, scientists, scholars, lawyers and university administrators that Epstein made a point of knowing.

Aside from Ghislaine and his other “help,” few people spent more quality time with Epstein over a longer period than Ehud Barak. Documents show he made 36 visits to Epstein’s New York apartment between 2013-2017 and several trips with his wife to Epstein’s notorious island in the Caribbean.

In a series of stories last fall, Drop Site News revealed that Epstein facilitated diplomatic and business deals for Israel at the behest of Barak, including the sale of surveillance equipment to several African nations and the creation of a back channel with Russia for Israeli negotiations during the Syrian war. At Barak’s urging, Epstein had also pursued a member of the Swiss Rothschild banking dynasty to finance cyberweapons for Israel.

One of the earliest outlets to cover Epstein-Israeli intelligence connection was MintPress News, which published a series of articles by Whitney Webb, including one that cites an interview by former CBS News executive producer and Narativ investigative journalist Zev Shalev with Ari Ben-Menashe, a former senior executive for Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence.

Ben-Menashe claimed in the interview “not only to have met Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in the 1980s, but that both Epstein and Maxwell were already working with Israeli intelligence during that time period.” Ben-Menashe told Shalev he saw Epstein in Robert Maxwell’s office several times in the 1980s.

Webb further reported that Epstein’s biggest financial backer, Les Wexner, was part of The Mega Group, a secretive group of billionaires formed in 1991 by Wexner and Seagrams dynasty heir Charles Bronfman, himself a business associate of Robert Maxwell. The group focused on “philanthropy and Jewishness.” One member went on to found the Birthright Israel non-profit organization, which brings young Jews from around the world to Israel for free and whose mission was described by that same member, Michael Steinhardt, as “devotion to and faith in” the state of Israel.

In a 2019 FBI memo filed days after Epstein’s death, Wexner was named as a co-conspirator in the Epstein case, an allegation his legal counsel has denied. He has not been charged. Wexner was scheduled to sit for a deposition before Congress from his Ohio residence regarding his relationship with Epstein on 18 February.

Familiar pattern

For someone who spent three years going down the rabbit hole of JFK assassination research for my book See No Evil, the DoJ’s handling of the Epstein files follows a familiar pattern – withhold the telling facts while investigative journalists, historians and bloggers carve out whole careers speculating on the larger picture for the American public with factual crumbs scraped from the tablecloth.

After decades of dribs and drabs released from the JFK assassination archives, the documents that would prove without a doubt that the Warren Report was a coverup remain locked in the last 1 percent of pages – fewer than 4,700 – still being withheld by the government for reasons of “national security” and “foreign partnerships.”

In the case of the Epstein files, the justice department is holding back some three million additional pages of documents – or about half the Epstein files – that justice department deputy Todd Blanche claims violate victim privacy and attorney-client privilege or would impact other unidentified “active investigations.’

While awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019, Epstein, 66, was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan after two guards who were supposed to check on him fell asleep and surveillance cameras of his cell tier were found to be missing three minutes of recordings.

His death was ruled a suicide, a finding that is now backed by the Trump administration to the outrage of Trump’s MAGA base. But those close to the case, including Brown and Epstein’s brother Mark, believe he was murdered.

In an ironic tidbit from the recent Epstein files release, former Norwegian diplomat Terje Rod-Larsen, who was fired for receiving a personal loan and donations from Epstein, emailed Epstein a 2013 Der Spiegel article about the mysterious fate of “Prisoner X,” an Australian Jew named Benjamin Zygier who was believed to be working for Mossad and was later accused by Israeli authorities of treasonous acts.

On 15 December, 2010, Zygier “was found dead in a solitary confinement cell in the Ayalon high-security prison near Tel Aviv,” according to the article. Zygier reportedly “hanged himself, even though he was the country’s best-guarded prisoner, monitored by four cameras. His lawyer had met him one or two days beforehand and said Zygier had seemed normal.”

Epstein, too, had seemed “normal” prior to his death. During his risk assessment with a prison psychiatrist, Epstein “adamantly denied” any suicidal thoughts, refuted all guilt in the case and, in fact, told the psychiatrist that “being alive is fun.”

You have to wonder if Epstein accomplice Jean Luc Brunel, who was found hanged in prison while awaiting trial three years later, also appeared normal.

What isn’t “normal” is that all three men would choose to die in prison in the same manner before they could even fight the charges against them.

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