“We are joining in wishing you Happy Birthday and all that you wish for yourself,” Ehud Barak emailed Jeffrey Epstein on January 20, 2014, the billionaire pedophile’s sixty-first birthday, as he explained how a surprise gift he and his wife, Nili Priel, had tried to arrange had fallen through. “I’m proud to be able calling [sic] you my friend.”
“Thank you. Look forward to seeing you, lots to talk about,” Epstein replied.
Barak and Epstein did have much to talk about — so much, in fact, that the pair met in person dozens of times over the course of the previous decade to talk in person, a perusal of the Justice Department’s latest release of files on the late sex offender show.
Jacobin looked at more than one thousand documents from the latest trove and identified more than sixty instances between September 2010 and March 2019 in which Barak and Epstein arranged to meet face to face — usually in New York, other times in Florida, Boston, Paris, or even Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St James. At least seven of those meetings took place while Barak was still serving as minister of defense for Israel.
That count does not include the dozens more times where the two arranged or tried to arrange to talk over the phone or via video call, nor their frequent email exchanges to each other. It also does not necessarily include the more than two dozen times in that period that Barak stayed at one of Epstein’s properties, typically the Upper East Side apartment building on 301 East 66th Street that he owned, which his staff referred to internally as simply “301.”
Since the thousand or so files are just a fraction of the total number of Barak-related documents in the trove, it is entirely possible these are undercounts. Yet the more than sixty meetings between the two is roughly double the number of times that Barak and Epstein had earlier been thought to have met, according to a previous Wall Street Journal report. And that report only…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
