“Now you can understand why Trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
That’s one of the sensational, damning Jeffrey Epstein messages that has been roundly quoted since being extracted from the more than 20,000 documents released by the House Oversight Committee last week, a seeming reference to the power Epstein held via the damaging information he had amassed on the rich and influential, the now-president included.
Yet oddly, what has been universally left out of media coverage of that quote is what it was in reference to: Epstein appeared to be taking credit for former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s reentry into Israeli politics in 2019, which aimed to topple current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the second of what would be three Israeli elections in a year.
The quote’s missing context fits squarely with the unofficial omertà in the mainstream press on discussing Epstein’s relationship to Israel — namely, the long-standing claims and rumors that the billionaire pedophile had been an asset or otherwise worked for Israeli intelligence.
That code of silence has been on the verge of breaking down over the past month, after Drop Site published a series of stories based on Barak’s hacked emails showing Epstein quietly carrying out work on behalf of the Israeli government. On Sunday, former Donald Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed to Drop Site’s reporting while on CNN to charge that “the right question to ask is, ‘Was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?’” — a charge met with pushback on the network.
The Oversight Committee’s release sheds further light on Epstein’s entanglement with Israel, primarily through the figure of Barak, long a known associate of Epstein’s who has insisted that he only saw the convicted pedophile “on occasion” and never in the presence of women or girls. The recently released tranche of emails adds to a raft of disclosures in recent…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
