I don’t know what’s in the Jeffrey Epstein “files,” nor do you. What we do know, however, is that the most popular conspiracy theories thrown around by the online mob lack any real evidence.
Sure, the Trump administration deserves blame for fanning the conspiratorial mindset of the Make America Great Again group. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s embarrassing press gaggle featuring some of the world’s most vacuous “influencers” waving empty “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders left the administration with a mess that’s impossible to fix.
If the Trump administration releases files that fail to quench the fevered expectations of social media, it will be accused of holding back the good stuff or destroying testimony. Influencers already want you to believe that FBI Director Kash Patel, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, President Donald Trump, and Bondi are all running interference for the pedophiles.
Then again, if Trump releases the “files,” or even the grand jury testimony — a significant portion of any investigation consists of accusations, uncorroborated accusations floated by people on the periphery of the case, third-hand accounts, theories, and rumors — it will only spawn a bunch of new conspiracies and demands.
As Brit Hume notes, there are two enduring truths about conspiracy theories: They almost never pan out, and they seldom go away.
Now, I’m not surprised many people are angered about the handling of the case. I’m not even contending that there might not be something useful to learn. But so much of what they are told is simply untrue.
Take, for instance, the existence of the oft-mentioned Epstein pedophile “client list.” You’d think we had some real confirmation of its existence, the way everyone demands its release. But the idea that Epstein kept a detailed record of illustrious CEOs and world leaders he blackmailed with sex crimes is implausible. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong one day. I suspect we watch too many movies.
The late Virginia Giuffre, who accused a handful of well-known people of trafficking in court, turned out to be unreliable. She sued Prince Andrew, who settled instead of being dragged into a U.S. courtroom, and Alan Dershowitz. The latter, Epstein’s lawyer, says there was never any “client list.” And Giuffre was compelled to drop her claim against Dershowitz and offer a de facto retraction.
Maybe you believe Dershowitz would lie in the Wall Street Journal to protect powerful strangers and a dead pedophile. I don’t. The names of a handful of accused have been redacted by a judge because there wasn’t even enough evidence to support a grand jury indictment, not that click-chasing “influencers” care one whit about innocence or due process.
The truth is, we already know a ton about Epstein’s monstrous criminality. There have been over 20 civil and criminal cases related to Epstein and his trafficking since 2005. His hamfisted efforts to extort Bill Gates show we weren’t exactly dealing with a Svengali. We have contact logs with 350 people, including billionaires and politicians such as former President Bill Clinton and Trump. You think a new file is going to get you better names?
In 2024, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., responding to a question about his own interactions with Epstein, told a podcaster, “So I run into everybody in New York. I mean, I knew Harvey Weinstein, I knew Roger Ailes … O.J. Simpson came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house.” Kennedy’s rationalization for hanging out with creeps sounds terrible to a normal person, no doubt. But it likely hits on a truth. Rich and famous people like to hang out with one another. It’s obvious that Epstein was obsessed with being in proximity to celebrity and influence. And many wealthy people hung out with Epstein after he’d been found guilty of trafficking girls. We should judge them for that. But that doesn’t make them sex criminals.
Another popular claim regarding Epstein is that his 2008 sweetheart plea deal with the feds was likely secured via some deep state intrigue. Megyn Kelly, for instance, recently told her 3.6 million followers:
“The U.S. Attny who spiked the case, Alex Acosta, is on record as saying Epstein was an intel agent and he was told to get rid of the prosecution. If Epstein was an agent it was clearly either for the U.S. or Israel – both deny it (what would you expect them to say?). He had multiple (odd) Israeli connections. This denial is meaningless.”
None of that is true.
Perhaps he will change his tune one day, but Acosta was never “on the record” saying any such thing. In fact, the source for this quote was a third-hand account reported by the Daily Beast in 2019. Not even the reporter of that sensationalist single anonymous-sourced story, Vicky Ward, says Epstein “was working for a particular government.”
“I have absolutely no doubt that Epstein never worked for any intelligence agency,” Dershowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “If he had, he would surely have told me and his other lawyers, who would have used that information to get him a better deal.” It’s highly improbable that crook, swindler, and pedophile Epstein had such a deep abiding loyalty to an intel agency that he failed to tell his lawyers about his astonishing association. Of course, these claims are unfalsifiable.
Also, there’s no existing evidence that Acosta “spiked” the Epstein case.
Indeed, there is a far more plausible and boring explanation for the plea deal. As Acosta told Congress under oath, a state grand jury recommended only a single charge be filed, with no jail time, no restitution, and no sex offender registration. Acosta got all of that in a plea deal.
Convicting Epstein, defended by a platoon of world-class lawyers, was far from a slam dunk. Epstein should have spent much longer in prison, but he may well have escaped without any punishment. Sean “Diddy” Combs was recently found not guilty of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking in his federal trial. Rich people skate all the time.
It was Florida, incidentally, not Acosta, that granted Epstein his infamous daily furloughs. Was Florida also under the control of an intel service? I guess we can’t disprove that either.
Finally, Epstein did not have “multiple (odd) Israeli connections.” He had none that we know of.
To understand why influencers, particularly those Jewish-obsessed ones such as Tucker Carlson, claim that Epstein was an Israeli spy, you will need to get out your whiteboard.
Epstein’s sidekick was Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite, now serving 20 years for securing underage girls for her sicko boss. Ghislaine, in turn, was the daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, who people say was a Mossad agent. Or, as one popular but ignorant lefty X account says, was “one of the most celebrated spies in Israel’s history.”
But there’s no evidence that Robert Maxwell was anything more than openly pro-Israel. The theory that he was a spy emanates largely from Ari Ben-Menashe, a con man who lied about serving in Mossad — in reality, he was fired as a translator for the Israeli military — among numerous other things. Ben-Menashe also claimed Epstein worked for Mossad, something he could not have known even if it were true.
Of course, even if Robert Maxwell had been helping Israeli intelligence, there is no evidence that his morally degenerate daughter, one of his nine children, was in the family business, much less that this one-time party girl convinced her creepy boss, whom she met after her father had died, to be a spy himself. To call that a “connection” to Israel is to render the word meaningless.
Conspiracy theorists will also point out that Epstein met with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “dozens of times.” They make this point as if it helps their case. It’s difficult to believe any lucid person truly believes that Israeli leaders would hobnob in public with super-secret assets that are blackmailing foreign government officials with underage honeytraps. Barak knew Epstein because the latter invested lots of money publicly in his tech startup, Reporty Homeland Security, one of the hundreds of startups he invested in throughout the world. There is nothing particularly “odd” about such an arrangement. The two reportedly met at Harvard, where Epstein often mingled with donors, celebrity politicians, and intellectuals.
You know who else would have been aware that Epstein was an Israeli spy? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If Epstein was an Israeli asset, do you think the prime minister of that country would have demanded an investigation into Epstein and Barak’s relationship? I’m sure people will email me to explain that it was all just misdirection.
You’ll notice that no one is wondering if MI6 was running Epstein because he had an odd relationship with Prince Andrew, had a British socialite at his side for years, and invested in British companies all the time. No one accused him of being a Saudi asset because he hung out with sheiks and had dealings with Adnan Khashoggi and others.
Then again, the most popular Epstein stuff reminds me a lot of Russia collusion hysteria. Many of the same people who rightly mocked the Left for believing that the White House could be controlled by Russians apparently now believe that the entire world can be controlled by a Bilderberg-style pedophile ring set up by Mossad. The pathological need for conspiracy these days, sustained in paranoia bubbles, is one of the most destructive things happening in public life.
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT STILL WON’T REVEAL ABOUT JEFFREY EPSTEIN
That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate questions about the case. For instance, the plausible explanation for why Epstein killed himself was to avoid a lifetime in prison. How authorities allowed that to happen needs further explanation. But demanding Trump confirm your unhinged thriller-novel priors is not a good-faith expectation.
Is the government hiding something? Usually, but it’s rarely what you think. And it almost certainly isn’t going to satiate the Epstein paranoia.