Late last month, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) published 3.5 million pages about convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
On top of the grotesque and horrifying photos and emails that appear to offer more evidence of systemic and widespread child abuse, the Epstein files revealed further allegations of his ties to Israel and its intelligence agency Mossad.
The Epstein/Israel revelations have been covered at length by independent and overseas media outlets:
- “The Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building” that Epstein managed (Drop Site News, 2/18/26). Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli spy Yoni Koren were frequent guests at the apartment, and Rafi Shlomo, then–director of protective service at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, “controlled access to the apartment for guests, and even conducted background checks on cleaners and Epstein’s employees.”
- An informant told the FBI he “became convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent” (Middle East Monitor, 2/8/26).
- Epstein emailed Barak in December 2018: “You should make clear that I don’t work for Mossad :)” (Dissident, 2/2/26). Barak responded, “You or I?” Epstein replied, “That I don’t :).”
- Epstein emailed Barak twice in November 2017 (London Times, 2/8/26): “Did Boies ask you to help obtain former Mossad agents to do dirty investigations?” and “Boies said he got to the Mossad guys through you? True? This is getting a lot of press.” Barak responded, “Call me. [Redacted] in Paris.” (Epstein was likely referring to attorney David Boies, who was facing scrutiny at the time for hiring a private firm, run largely by former Mossad officers, to investigate women who accused his client Harvey Weinstein of rape, and journalists trying to expose the allegations—New Yorker, 11/6/17.)
- Epstein’s foundation backed pro-Israel projects like Friends of Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish National Fund, which buys land in Palestine to build settlements (Middle East Eye, 2/7/26).
Adding to existing evidence
It is important to note that the Epstein emails contain allegations and intimations, and don’t prove that Epstein was an Israeli agent, formally or informally. However, they do add to the existing evidence that Epstein used his considerable connections and wealth to assist the Israeli state.
The Epstein/Israel ties were reported before the latest DoJ release by various independent media outlets, particularly Drop Site News. Drop Site’s reporting received scant coverage by US corporate media, as I documented at the time (FAIR.org. 11/14/25).
Drop Site based its reporting on a hack purportedly emanating from Iran’s government. The hack’s source seemed to have explained—at least in part—the lack of US corporate media coverage. The latest Epstein/Mossad ties, on the other hand, were uncovered in a release by the DoJ—a more acceptable source by US corporate media standards. (The Justice release confirmed some of the details in Drop Site‘s reporting based on the Iranian hack, such as Epstein’s close ties to the Israeli spy Yoni Koren—Drop Site, 11/11/25; Al Jazeera, 2/9/26.)
And yet only a few US corporate media outlets—most notably Axios, New York magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Atlantic—have referenced the latest Epstein/Israel revelations.
Even then, these outlets cast doubt on the legitimacy of the connections by framing them as conspiracy theories, or conspiracy-adjacent—hardly a surprise, given previous US corporate media coverage.
‘Ample fodder for speculation’
Axios (2/3/26) wrote:
FBI source reports and internal emails contain unverified claims and secondhand suspicions about Epstein’s possible ties to Mossad and other intelligence services—material that stops well short of proof, but offers ample fodder for speculation.
A week later, Axios (2/10/26) acknowledged that Barak and his wife “stayed at Epstein’s apartment multiple times from 2015 to 2019,” citing Israeli media reports. Axios‘ Rebecca Falconer wrote that Barak “has said he ‘deeply regrets’ his past relationship with Epstein, and that he never saw nor participated in any inappropriate behavior during their meetings.” Falconer added:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected conspiracy theories peddled online that his longtime political rival Barak’s “unusual close relationship” indicated that Epstein was an Israeli spy.
Although New York features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood (2/6/26) mentioned “former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak” as one of the “seemingly endless list of VIPs” corresponding with Epstein, it warned against looking too hard at Epstein’s ties to the Israeli state by linking an interest in the issue to antisemitism:
The horseshoe nature of the scandal makes it hard to untangle speculation about, say, Epstein’s intelligence ties from the antisemitism that is pervasive in Epstein discourse. “Yes, we are ruled by Satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” announced the YouTuber Candace Owens, who may have been reading the same emails that prompted the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur to post, “To my knowledge no one in legacy media has ever even discussed the possibility that Epstein was Mossad when it is all over the files.”
Right-wing conspiracy theories based in antisemitism (like Owens’) are a toxic form of discourse. But the latest batch of files—and Drop Site’s previous coverage, which Uygur has previously covered—is not hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and does more than just offer “ample fodder for speculation.”
‘Dark workings of cabals’
Still, pundits like the Wall Street Journal‘s Barton Swaim (2/11/26) treated questions of Epstein and Israel as necessarily conspiratorial, heaping scorn on “influencers and politicos determined to attribute all bad things to the dark workings of cabals,” and citing how “Tucker Carlson conjectured that Epstein worked with the Mossad to blackmail its enemies.”
And the Atlantic (2/7/26) wrote that, “in death, Epstein has taken on far more significance than he did in life”:
Some Americans were already primed to believe in international pedophilia rings. Bonus points if they were run by wealthy Jews—Jews who were perhaps on the Mossad payroll, as many conspiracists have insisted Epstein was.
Jacob Shamsian of Business Insider (2/14/26) asked whether “there were any truth to the rumored connections to the CIA or the Mossad,” only to handwave away those connections by citing anonymous sources. Shamsian pointed to “four people who had access to the Justice Department’s files,” who “said there was no trace of intelligence material, which would have been the case if Epstein or Maxwell’s crimes were tied to the CIA or Mossad.”
To Compact editor Matthew Schmitz (Washington Post, 2/12/26), the “scourge of rising antisemitism in recent years has found its latest manifestation in the government’s release of millions of files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” Schmitz referenced “antiestablishment voices” that “have advanced the claim that Jewish networks and interests are corrupting American society.” He lumped together “antisemites on the left and right,” linking Owens and Tucker Carlson with “progressive influencers” Ana Kasparian and Briahna Joy Gray. But Schmitz omitted any mention of Epstein and Barak’s very real relationship.
A selective list of ‘powerful men’
The New York Times, for its part, largely downplayed the relationship between Epstein and Barak, and omitted key context. A Times article (2/5/26) on Epstein’s ties with tech start-ups briefly mentioned that Epstein “suggested to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, that he speak with Mr. Thiel about an advisory role” at Palantir.
The Times quoted a Palantir spokesperson as denying “Epstein ever investing in or being a shareholder in Palantir,” and asserting that Palantir “has never had a business relationship with Ehud Barak.” They failed to mention that Palantir signed its first contract with the Israeli government a year after the Epstein/Barak conversation.
Less than a week later, the Times (2/11/26) wrote that “political score-settling has played a part in the reaction in other countries,” including in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “played up disclosures of emails” between Epstein and Barak.
The Times noted in that piece that “India’s foreign ministry dismissed an email from Mr. Epstein, in which he appeared to take credit for the ingratiating approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a landmark state visit to Israel in 2017.”
The paper omitted the detail that Epstein had connected Barak to Anil Ambani, an Indian billionaire close to Modi, ahead of the trip. Drop Site (1/31/26) reported that the introduction “helped accelerate the burgeoning relationship” between Israel, India and the US.
More tangible ties
The sparse US corporate media coverage of the Epstein/Israel angle sharply contrasts with the extensive reporting of Epstein’s alleged ties to Russia.
Epstein visited Russia at least three times during the 2000s. He maintained a network of recruiters in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, whom he tasked with finding “girls”—often using modeling agencies as a front to traffic them to the US or Europe. He maintained Russian bank accounts and sought investments in Russia.
Although Russia was referenced somewhat more often than Israel in the files—about 5,400 to 4,800 times—Epstein’s connections to Barak were far more tangible than his ties to Russian government figures.
Epstein tried to meet with Putin multiple times, but there is no evidence that he ever succeeded (Washington Post, 2/7/26). Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors and former Russian government officials, but there isn’t a Russian equivalent to Barak, with whom Epstein shared over 4,000 email messages.
Indeed, Epstein and Barak arranged to meet face-to-face more than 60 times between September 2010 to March 2019. At least seven of these meetings took place while Barak was serving as minister of Defense for Israel (Jacobin, 2/6/26).
‘Might replace Putin’
At least one email thread even connected Epstein to an anti-Putin dissident. Politician Ilya Ponomarev sent an email in 2011 to Bill Gates’ adviser Boris Nikolic, asking how he could gain access to the World Economic Forum in Davos “to communicate what is going on, so that not only official Putin’s voice is heard.” His email came as Ponomarev was participating in mass protests against Putin and his reelection during the 2011 Russian presidential election.
Nikolic forwarded Ponomarev’s email to Epstein, writing: “We should go soon to Russia and you should meet my friend Ilya Ponomarev,” who he described as the “main organizer of the uprising against Putin.” He “might replace Putin and become a president by himself” if “he does not get killed before,” Nikolic said. He asked how Epstein could help, “not with Davos but with the other stuff in general.”
Epstein replied: “I can do end of March.”
It’s not clear from the files whether Epstein ever met with Ponomarev, but the email thread was noteworthy, showing Epstein’s willingness to meet with an anti-Putin dissident.
Yet it received only one mention in the US corporate media—from Yahoo (2/5/26), which republished an article from the Kyiv Independent (2/5/26), a Ukraine-based news outlet that receives funding from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy.
Beyond including the email in the article, the Kyiv Independent didn’t bother expanding on its significance. Instead, the outlet wrote:
The documents do not prove that Epstein worked for Russian intelligence.
They do, however, reveal sustained, multi-year efforts by Epstein to embed himself in Russia’s political, financial and diplomatic circles—efforts marked by persistence, access-seeking and repeated attempts to present himself as useful to the Kremlin.
‘Whom Epstein was really working for’
Among the US corporate media outlets to cover the Epstein/Russia connection in-depth are the New York Post, Washington Post and New York Times.
A headline in the New York Post (2/2/26) read: “Emails Reveal New Theory About Whom Jeffrey Epstein Was Really Working For.”
The right-wing outlet relied on two anonymous sources—”people close to the Russian tyrant” and “US security officials”—and an article by the British tabloid Daily Mail (1/31/26), which based its reporting on “intelligence sources.”
In the final four paragraphs of the article, the New York Post acknowledged Epstein’s well-established connections to Israel—noting that his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was the daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, widely reported to be a Mossad agent—but excluded any mention of the recent revelations.
Two days later, the New York Post ran an article (2/4/26) that detailed how Poland was launching a probe into whether Epstein was working as a Russian spy.
The right-wing outlet also published an article (2/7/26) about Epstein’s ties to “key Russian government figures.” These figures included Sergey Belyakov, who the Post described as “Russia’s deputy economic minister at the time, and a Kremlin secret service–trained spy who Epstein often appeared to use as his personal fixer in Moscow,” as well as Vitaly Churkin, “Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, between 2015 and his 2017 death.” The New York Post did not mention that Epstein introduced Belyakov to Barak in April 2015 (Reason, 8/27/25; Drop Site, 10/30/25; Washington Post, 2/7/26).
‘Added momentum to previous suspicions’
The Washington Post (2/7/26) similarly hyped up a Russia connection under the headline “Epstein Built Ties to Russians and Sought to Meet Putin, Files Show.”
Jeff Bezos’ Post—which recently largely gutted its foreign reporting desk—wrote that the files “show repeated attempts in the 2010s to arrange a meeting” with Putin, but added that there was “no evidence in the Justice Department files that such a meeting ever took place.”
The Post (2/6/26) ran another article about the Russia ties, this time about “Russian expatriate tech investors who have drawn scrutiny from US intelligence agencies over their past ties with the Kremlin.”
The Post speculated:
The newly revealed extent of Epstein’s Russian connections, which also include senior Russian government officials, has added momentum to previous suspicions that he worked with or was targeted by intelligence agencies because of his personal connections to international elites.
In its own longform article on the Epstein/Russia connection, the New York Times (2/10/26) similarly wrote that the latest batch of files have “raised new questions among Russia’s critics about whether the relationships opened the door to Russian intelligence activity.”
It is possible that Epstein was a Russian intelligence asset. However, there is no good reason for the US corporate media to frame these allegations as a real possibility, while ignoring the Epstein/Israel ties, or continuing to paint them as a far-fetched conspiracy theory.
The latest batch of files deepens the evidence, documented by Drop Site and others, that Epstein was engaged in assisting the Israeli state, serving as a go-between on commercial, diplomatic and intelligence matters. Although Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors and former Russian government officials, no evidence has yet surfaced that he advocated on behalf of Russian interests. The only reasons to think that the former is more newsworthy than the latter are purely political.
It seems we are in a time warp or black hole in space. Israel’s apparent lock on the American media, suggested by repeated allusions to ethnic hate whenever compelling evidence leads to implicating the Israeli State in criminal breaches of international laws, is meant to change our understanding of what is obviously true. How long this effort to deny, deny, and deny some more will endure, is a question that everyone needs to be asking.
Thanks to Drew Favakeh for great detail and analysis that our commercial media are incapable of providing.
Great comment. Absolutely agree.
This is a good article, and there needs to be more research while many media already say “there is no connection from Epstein to secret services”.
That said, what really took and shocked me was the narrow ties between wonderful Noam Chomsky and Epstein. I couldn’t sleep for 2 nights, not too interesting for the rest of the world^^, but this is horrible. Chomsky’s second wife, speaking for them both, called Epstein “their best friend”. And she added she meant that, “best”. And even as late as in 2019 Chomsky just told Epstein to “shrug it off”. This needed a whole book, taken that Chomsky was referring to the distortion many media do; but in 2019 nobody in the USA could not know about Epstein’s criminal horrors and disgusting abuse of powerless women and children…
At the same time I think our liberal cultural media “shrug off” that, for example, Michel Foucault was accused of raping and abusing 7-13 year old boys in Tunisia – while the same liberal media otherwise and rightfully report over weeks about each priest and anyone who did similar crimes against women and children.
If it suits all the much adored philosophical “Goddesses” of all gender orientations they simply say “our hero would never do this”. Even if many in his age knew he did, indeed. For any horrible offender – mostly right, for sure! – they say “he did that”. If we adore someone, they say “were you a witness, did you stand nearby?” My…..
And even though rather sadistic pages at length in his works are very hard to overlook (in which, looking aside, so many in the liberal and conservative university departments are rather good in, it seems^^).
It feels strange – Chomsky is now “disgraced” because he, who never did such horrors, for reasons I can’t understand was friends with a horrible man, used his flats in Paris and elsewhere etc. But people who really are plausibly accused of raping children for small coins are adored by liberals ( and conservative-neoliberals who also embrace the Nietzsche Foucault Deleuze Glucksman Derrida Zizek fashion etc ). This feels like “real actions don’t matter, but what we want to see matters a lot”. In other words – possibly double standards.
Still, Chomsky’s connections to Epstein even in 2019, and that he, while this in decades so wonderful man could before his stroke, did not admit it – – this shocked me deeply.
***
The editor of counterpunch, Jeffrey St Clair, wrote, if Epstein wasn’t an agent for Israel he at least was an asset they used often. Maybe it is something like this, maybe we’ll learn the truth about it in an age where self declared “Leftists” boast and brag about “there is no truth” and feel so fine and intelligent with it in their circles of intellectual power…
The whole “Roaming charges” of February 9, also about Epstein and Chomsky, is very good. I don’t know if links are much liked, so if you feel like it, read “Roaming charges: If you’re not a Scumbag, you’re a Nobody”.
At times it really feels like it in these distorted times. We can’t know if Epstein was an agent for Israel yet, and in my view we should clearly say so. But to say, like the article does, that many media just do not even ask, well, this is as it is.
To come back to Chomsky, whose work over all the decades was wonderful in rather shaky times, Chomsky always seemed to say that we need to start in our own countries and systems to look into what is deeply wrong. And it is horrible that they now – with reasons! – connect Chomsky to Epstein and might sideline his works. Because a whole lot of distortions and double standards happens, and since 35 years, also in “our systems”, in the ruling post-structuralist majority-universities. In Germany for example there was a lot of schizophrenia: those who all adore Butler’s transgender fights are the same who a) lead capitalist climate-destructive life styles, like Butler herself is doing, flying all around the world for many many hundreds of times, b) denied the horrors Israel did to Gaza after the Hamas atrocities.
Chomsky was the one to not allow these double standards that are far too common in the liberal, today neoliberal conservative fan groups adoring – Foucault, Derrida, De Man, Butler, Brown…etc. Chomsky was the one to see through people if they – for decades – rather ignored social questions (as Judith Butler did) – and suddenly started to talk about Karl Marx…
Epstein was a predator, he abused and helped to abuse uncounted many women and children, and Chomsky could, in 2019, advice him to “shrug it off” – the same Chomsky who knew facts of everything and had it ready to tell about – everything…. This is a blow. What would we say if anyone says Chomsky belittled the sufferings of all the women and children abused? It is impossible that Chomsky did not know, in 2019, who Epstein was…
Chomsky duped us all did he not? Reminds me of that saying….
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain
This article shows why the left is so pathetic in this country, its completely obvious he worked for Israel and its completely obvious why MSM won’t talk about it (all MSM are run by zionist jews)
but your so terrified of being called antisemitic that you have to dance around the facts and not mention any powerful Jewish interests involved.
From Google’s A.I. Overview:
** The claim that “Zionist Jews run the mainstream media (MSM)” is a widely recognized antisemitic conspiracy theory. It is a modern manifestation of long-standing, false allegations that a secret Jewish cabal controls global institutions.
The claim is antisemitic for several key reasons:
Basis in historical antisemitic tropes: The idea that Jews secretly control the media, banks, or governments is a core component of ancient antisemitic myths, most notably popularized by the fabricated document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
– Perpetuates a harmful stereotype: It promotes the stereotype that Jews, as a monolithic group, wield inordinate and secretive power over the media and the world, often for nefarious purposes.
– Targets a protected group: While Zionism is a political movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, the term “Zionist” is often used as a thinly veiled substitute for “Jew” in such accusations to provide a false sense of political critique rather than hate speech. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) explicitly identify the claim that “Zionists control the media” as an antisemitic trope.
– Connection to extremist ideologies: The claim is prevalent among white supremacists and other extremist groups, often using terms like “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) to push a narrative of Jewish control.
Various social media platforms and institutions have banned content containing this claim because it constitutes harmful stereotypes and hate speech.
Oversimplifications are the idiots copium, do better, stop giving into idiotic white supremacist wank.
Another Google A.I. Overview….
** The reason for the antisemitic trope that claims jews run the MSM is to further distract you from a class based critique of the system that has resulted in the media being more consolidated than ever before in human history.
The trope that “Jews run the media” is a long-standing, fabricated conspiracy theory rooted in early 20th-century anti-Jewish propaganda, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which aimed to paint Jewish people as puppet masters of global institutions.
Museum of Jewish Heritage
Museum of Jewish Heritage.
While media consolidation is a real, well-documented, and accelerating phenomenon—leading to a small number of corporations controlling the vast majority of mainstream media (MSM)—attributing this to a Jewish conspiracy serves to distort, misdirect, and obfuscate the structural, class-based causes of this consolidation.
How the Trope Functions as Distraction:
Scapegoating over Analysis: The trope promotes a “conspiracy theory of secret Jewish power” rather than an examination of corporate capitalism, media deregulation, and the economic incentives that drive media mergers.
Conflating Diverse Individuals with “Group Control”: It takes the success or prominence of individual Jewish people in media/finance and falsely presents them as acting in concert to further a monolithic, anti-democratic agenda, ignoring the vast diversity of Jewish people.
Obscuring Class Issues: By focusing on the identity of individuals, it distracts from the class-based issues inherent in, for instance, a few billionaires (regardless of background) owning the vast majority of media outlets, which in turn influences public opinion and political discourse.
“Cosmopolitan Elite” Dog-Whistles: The narrative often employs terms like “globalists” or “cosmopolitan elites,” linking Jewish people to a conspiratorial upper class, which shifts focus away from the broader systemic inequalities.
The Reality of Media Consolidation
A Systemic Issue: The consolidation of media is driven by capital accumulation, profit maximization, and a decrease in government regulation of media ownership over the last several decades, not by a specific ethnic group.
A “Puppeteer” Myth: The myth is often accompanied by offensive, dehumanizing imagery—such as octopuses with tentacles clutching the globe or “puppeteers”—to suggest a secretive, controlling force.
In summary, blaming Jewish people for media consolidation functions as a “shorthand tool” for hatred that replaces a substantive critique of economic power structures with a harmful, historical conspiracy theory.**