Epstein's Death: A Predictable 'Surprise'

The death of the wealthy pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, right, on Aug. 10 in a New York prison has been expected in investigative circles.

His death became almost foreordained by recent revelations publicly linking him ever more closely to powerful foreign intelligence assets and mob figures, not simply to underage girls and the celebrities who socialized in his circle.

Although there are many people and institutions that bear some responsibility for Epstein’s death and the crime cover up that has existed for years, responsibility for the death falls directly on U.S. Attorney General William Barr, a master of covering up deadly and otherwise sinister crimes of massive historical importance, as we reported in Trump Found His Roy Cohn In Deep State Fixer Bill Barr.

The column documented Barr’s work first as a CIA operative working with CIA Director George H.W. Bush in 1976 and then as cover-up artist in the Reagan-Bush Justice Department. There, Barr rose to the post of Attorney General after he  helped thwart massive investigations of government-enabled narcotics and arms smuggling and money-laundering that help fill Republican Party coffers around the nation, as our column reported.

Then Bush and Barr orchestrated Bush pardons of six high-level Iran-Contra U.S. government criminals in 1992, thereby ensuring that Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation would fail

Barr, left, is implicated in Epstein’s death even if Barr’s role was merely of the “let it happen” method whereby Barr’s subordinates in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons created the conditions enabling either Epstein’s suicide or murder in the high-security, federally run Manhattan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan. That prison has been entrusted with housing some of the nation’s leading criminals in recent decades, including Mafia leader John Gotti.

The paragraphs above summarize this editor’s opinions after reviewing closely the news reports and commentaries this weekend about Epstein’s death. Previously, I reported on the careers of Epstein, Barr, Donald Trump and a number of other figures involved with them.

The opinions are derived also from daily conversations and emails from a circle of fellow investigative reporters who have researched Epstein for years, as well as other mob and intelligence-affiliated sex traffickers who specialize in providing underage sex victims to important government, business and media leaders, in part for the purpose of political blackmail.

One of those experts is investigative reporter and former Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen, who predicted Epstein’s death in two columns published last month in The Wayne Madsen Report (“WMR,” a daily subscription investigative report). The reports on July 25 and 26 came after Epstein was found with bruises on his neck in his MCC cell, the bruises ascribed either to an attempt at hanging or strangulation.

This editor collaborated with Madsen on a multipart series Welcome To Waterbury: The City That Holds Secrets That Could Bring Trump Down in early 2018.

We reported that Epstein and Trump had raped a 13-year-old “Katie” and a 12-year-old “Maria” at a New York mansion belonging to Epstein’s friend Leslie Wexner but that “Katie” dropped her 2016 lawsuit with the allegations after receiving death threats and that cowardly news organizations have suppressed their reporting, with Justice Department prosecutors so far showing no sign of bringing forward witnesses like former Trump counsel Michael Cohen who presumably could shed light on such situations.

Not just complaining girls but Cohen himself, now serving a three-year sentence in the federal correctional center in Otisville, New York, surely must have observed with dread the federal malfeasance leading to Epstein’s death.

Citing a number of specific clues, Madsen predicted Epstein’s death last month in his WMR column: Is Epstein the target for a mob hit,, as follows:

What is apparent with Epstein’s so-called “attempted suicide” in the Park Row jail is that some very powerful interests do not want to see Epstein come to trial in New York.

These individuals, who include Donald Trump, would rest much easier if Epstein died either by suicide, murder, or murder made to look like suicide. It matters very little if Epstein died while ensconced under tight restrictions at his Upper East Side mansion or in the MCC with access to him by other inmates.

Among others who have voiced astonishment that the Bureau of Prisons would allow Epstein to die in federal custody is longtime Republican Bernard Kerik, right, who supervised New York City’s corrections system for five years beginning in the 1995-2000 before becoming city’s police chief under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President Bush’s first nominee (later withdrawn) to become Secretary of then-new Department of Homeland Security.

Kerik, writing Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide makes no sense for the Capitol Hill tabloid The Hill, commented:

Accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s death this morning — reportedly a suicide, according to federal officials — is an inexplicable end to a bizarre, tragic case that only got more disturbing the more we learned about it.

The fact that one of the country’s highest-profile federal prisoners could even commit suicide defies all logic and belief.

His death raises doubts about officials’ actions. The FBI says it will investigate; Attorney General William Barr says he is “appalled” by what happened; members of Congress such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are demanding answers. Indeed we all need answers, before we lose all faith in our justice system.

Trump has responded by retweeting an allegation by a right-wing propagandist that the Clintons are somehow responsible for Epstein’s death. Vanity Fair reported: Trump’s Epstein Response: The Clintons Are Definitely Pedophile Murderers, “The president plumbed new depths by retweeting conspiracy theories about Epstein’s suicide, in lieu of making a public statement.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported the disappearance of Epstein’s former girlfriend and fellow trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, heir to newspaper magnate and purported Mossad asset Robert Maxwell. The Post article Epstein’s death leaves prosecutors with prime target: Ghislaine Maxwell by Marc Fisher said: 

It was through a 2015 defamation lawsuit filed against Maxwell by one of Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre that thousands of pages of documents containing detailed accounts of Epstein’s alleged abuses became public last week.

Johanna Sjoberg, a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University when she said Maxwell hired her as an assistant, said in a 2015 deposition that was released Friday that it was Maxwell’s job to ensure that three girls a day were made available to Epstein for his sexual pleasure.

Giuffre, who says she was recruited by Maxwell after being a towel-girl at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, is shown at center in a 2001 photo with Maxwell at right and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, at left. The thousands of pages released last week by a federal judge, possibly triggering Epstein’s death, are available at the Blackstone Vault: Epstein files.

With so many new developments each day, our Justice Integrity Project coverage includes multiple subsites that we frequently update. They focus on specialized but often overlapping dimensions of the scandal as follows: #MeToo News (including sex trafficking and major sexual harassment scandals); Media News; Deep State; and Trump Watch.(including major developments last week as House leaders move towards court challenges of the president as part of an impeachment process).

Jeffrey Epstein (highlighted) with the Trumps and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)

Commentaries on Epstein Death

Below are links to notable expert commentaries about the death of Epstein (shown in a mug shot last month) and its implications for the Justice system and the Trump presidency:

• TheHill.com, Opinion: Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide makes no sense, Bernard B. Kerik
• SouthFront, Jeffrey Epstein RIP: But Many More Questions Remain to be Answered, Philip M. Giraldi
• Washington Post, Opinion: Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide is unfathomable, Harry Litman
• David Talbot via Facebook, Opinion: The “suicide” of Jeffrey Epstein, David Talbot 
• New York Post, Jeffrey Epstein could have ‘paid’ for help with suicide: Former Gotti pal, Brad Hamilton
• New York Magazine, A Former U.S. Attorney on Where Epstein’s Legal Cases Will Go After His Death, Matt Stieb
• Palmer Report, Analysis: Bill Barr just gave something away about Jeffrey Epstein’s death, Bill Palmer
• Vanity Fair, Trump’s Epstein Response: The Clintons Are Definitely Pedophile Murderers, Kevin Fitzpatrick
• LewRockwell.com, What Do All These People Have In Common? 

What About the Clintons?

Republican partisans, including their well-funded propagandists, have developed the meme “WhatAboutism” during recent years to deflect specific evidence or allegations against their leaders by changing the topic, often with the battle cry “What about Bill Clinton?”

There is some relevance the case of Epstein because the former president is listed as having travelled on his plain and Epstein and Maxwell did interact socially at times with the Clintons and Epstein did contribute to the Clinton Foundation.

However, those interactions with the Clintons in no way compare in scope with the those of Trump (shown with Epstein at a Mar-a-Lago party ogling cheerleaders. In particular, no reasonably credible allegation has yet surfaced that the former president engaged in sexual activities in Epstein’s circle.

Similarly, Democrats — including former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell — were named by Giuffre as her partners when she served as what she called a “sex slave” for Epstein and Maxwell. Those officials have denied culpability.

Importantly, the former president, Richardson and Mitchell and most of the other alleged abusers did not hold relevant government power over criminal proceedings when Epstein was being criminally investigated by federal and Florida authorities on sex trafficking charges during the Bush Presidency in 2007-2008 or more currently.

U.S. Attorney for Miami Alexander Acosta, left, later rewarded by Trump with appointment as U.S. Secretary of Labor in 2017, arranged that unusual plea deal whereby Epstein served just 13 months part-time in a Palm Beach jail.

Authorities promised not to investigate his fellow traffickers or others (including his celebrity friends) involved with his network, despite evidence that more than hundred junior high and high school girls were victimized from Florida alone. Epstein had homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and travelled widely around the world.

This editor is among those who call for vigorous prosecution of all abusers, whatever their political affiliation and whatever their other status. Yet it is only Trump who appointed Acosta as Secretary of Labor, which investigates sex trafficking, and Barr, whose control over federal prisons and prosecutions makes his promise to investigate Barr’s death a travesty given Barr’s own sordid history, including his zeal in protecting Trump from investigation.

What Spies? What Intelligence Connections?

Some readers here might also question references to potential intelligence connections to the Epstein scandal, particularly because the mainstream media have ignored those story leads almost entirely. True, such ties are inherently covert and controversial. Nonetheless, several expert reporters have made compelling cases that Epstein was not simply a self-indulgent pedophile but also a “Deep State” operative who followed a tradition dating back more than half a century whereby intelligence agencies worked with corrupt operatives like Epstein to obtain blackmail material on U.S. leaders for later use in influencing policy.

Investigative reporter Whitney Webb published a compelling three-part series on this history in MintPress News on July 18, July 25 and Aug. 7. She tied Epstein, Wexner and a number of their associates to support for Israel via its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, and otherwise.

Her most recent column was headlined: Mega Group, Maxwells, and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal (Part III). Webb, right, began:

The picture painted by the evidence is not a direct Epstein tie to a single intelligence agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group, politicians, and officials in both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in both nations.

As billionaire pedophile and alleged sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein sits in prison, reports have continued to surface about his reported links to intelligence, his financial ties to several companies and “charitable” foundations, and his friendships with the rich and powerful as well as top politicians.

While Part I and Part II of this series, “The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail,” have focused on the widespread nature of sexual blackmail operations in recent American history and their ties to the heights of American political power and the U.S. intelligence community, one key aspect of Epstein’s own sex-trafficking and blackmail operation that warrants examination is Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence and his ties to the “informal” pro-Israel philanthropist faction known as “the Mega Group.”

The Mega Group’s role in the Epstein case has garnered some attention, as Epstein’s main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner (right), was a co-founder of the group that unites several well-known businessmen with a penchant for pro-Israel and ethno-philanthropy (i.e., philanthropy benefiting a single ethnic or ethno-religious group).

However, as this report will show, another uniting factor among Mega Group members is deep ties to organized crime, specifically the organized crime network discussed in Part I of this series, which was largely led by notorious American mobster Meyer Lansky.

Dr. Philip Girardi, a think tank leader and former former CIA and military intelligence officer, is among those who have written similar reports in recent days. His column, Jeffrey Epstein RIP: But Many More Questions Remain to be Answered, appeared in the Unz Review, among other locales.

Giraldi wrote that in his experience a foreign intelligence service would not be able to operate assets like Epstein quite so brazenly as it appears without approval by at least some well-connected U.S. government officials.

In that vein, Girardi wrote:

My belief that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence agent is based principally on Acosta’s comments when being cleared by the Trump transition team. He was asked “Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” … “Acosta testified that he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.’”

The questions about Epstein remain even though he is gone, but one fears that the authorities will be disinclined to further investigate a dead man. It appears that no one in the various investigative agencies or the mainstream media has been interested in what Acosta meant, even though it would be simple enough to ask him.

Who told him to back off? And how did they explain it? And then there is Epstein’s Austrian passport. Was it fake or real, with a real name and photo substitution or alternation of both picture and name? How did he get it? Austrian passports are highly desirable in intelligence circles because the country is neutral and its holders can travel just about everywhere without a visa.

Girardi continued:

And there’s more. As a former intelligence officer myself, there is little doubt in my mind that what Epstein did and how he did it was an intelligence operation. There is no other viable explanation for his filming of prominent politicians and celebrities having sex with young girls.

And as for the question of whom Epstein might have been working for, the most likely answer is Mossad. The CIA would have had no interest in compiling dossiers on prominent Americans, but American movers and shakers like Bill Clinton, with his 26 trips on the ‘Lolita Express,’ former Governor Bill Richardson, or former Senator George Mitchell are precisely the types of “agents of influence” that the Mossad would seek to coerce or even blackmail into cooperation.

Other compelling evidence for a Mossad connection came from Epstein’s relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, who reportedly served as his key procurer of young girls. Ghislaine is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who died or possibly was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in 1991. Maxwell was an Anglo-Jewish businessman, very cosmopolitan in profile, like Epstein, a multi-millionaire who was very controversial with what were regarded as ongoing ties to Mossad. After his death, he was given a state funeral by Israel in which six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence listened while Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.”

Israel and high-profile Jewish players also have continued to turn up like bad pennies in the Epstein case, but no one seems to be interested in pursuing that angle. Epstein clearly had contact with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak and Wexner also had close ties to the Jewish state and its government.

In a similar column alleging that Epstein had sinister and deep ties to the financial world, British entertainer Johnny Vedmore last month published The Epstein Associate Nobody’s Talking About: The IDF-Linked Bond Girl Infiltrating the UK NHS. As in most such stories, those named denied any culpability.

Treatment in the mainstream media of these topics is virtually non-existent despite the scores of supposedly in-depth treatments of the Epstein case that have been appearing recently.

Part of the reluctance, undoubtedly, is the difficulty of documentation and fear of reprisal from powerful figures, some of whom (like Wexner) lead giant retailing companies and thus spend heavily on media advertising as well as on philanthropy for causes that some media decision-makers doubtless find attractive.

Despite those obstacles, independent researchers have undertaken much of spadework on Epstein for years. They include Vicky Ward (whose pioneering report for Vanity Fair was gutted in significant part before publication in 2003), Nick Bryant, Sharon Churcher and Conchita Sarnoff. The Miami Herald’s investigative series on Epstein last fall, “Perversion of Justice,” raised scandal’s profile immensely with interviews of Epstein’s victims that were primarily by lead reporter Julie K. Brown and video producer Emily Michot.

Wayne Madsen (shown in a 2015 photo), a former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, also has provided cutting-edge reporting through the years. He and this editor interviewed experts on organized crime three years ago on a trip to Columbus, Ohio, where we learned of Wexner and Epstein’s relationships with prominent mob interests in the region.

And when Trump nominated Acosta in February 2017 to join his cabinet Madsen responded the next day by publishing the first part of a series documenting Acosta’s nefarious work as a cover-up mastermind in the Epstein case. Meanwhile, the U. S. Senate largely ignored Acosta’s multiple scandals as U.S. attorney during confirmation hearings, much as the Senate did with Barr’s decades of cover scandals during this confirmation hearing in January, and confirmed Acosta narrowly in March 2017 with a vote largely along party lines.

‘A Lawless, Criminal Nation?’

There’s much more to say but since something new seems to be reported every few minutes we point readers to the above-mentioned special sites updated  each day, particularly the #MeToo site on trafficking.

We conclude for now with words from David Talbot, the best-selling author of The Devil’s Chessboard, Season of the Witch and Brothers. Talbot, shown at right and also founder of the Salon Media Group, wrote on his Facebook page over the weekend a powerful denunciation of the U.S. legal system that allowed Epstein’s corruption and demise.

“Well, it’s official,” he wrote. “We now live in a criminal, lawless nation where people who know too much about the sleazy lives of the rich and powerful can be ‘suicided’ to death — even when they’re on suicide watch in a New York City jail cell!”

He continued:

The “suicide” of Jeffrey Epstein — oh what the hell, let’s call it what it really was, a politically necessary execution — reeks of the “suicide” of Craig Spence back in 1989.

Spence (below), a Republican lobbyist with deep ties to the Reagan presidency, ran a Washington call-boy service and, like Epstein, had the goods on many of America’s decadent elite. After his sex racket exploded in the headlines, Spence told friends he would probably be murdered — a termination that would be called a suicide. And guess what? In November 1989, Spence was indeed found “suicided” in a Ritz Carlton hotel room in Boston….

A final note on this flaming conspiracy to silence the latest man who knew too much.

For decades, the corporate media have been ridiculing and condemning those who believe that power in the U.S. often operates in darkly clandestine ways. The New York Times, Washington Post, TV networks et al have worked feverishly to marginalize the deep investigative work done by citizen researchers and independent journalists (including me) to shed light on the national security assassination of President Kennedy.

Eye-opening investigations into 9/11 — and the undeniable web of connections between Saudi royalty and the hijackers, U.S. agencies’ foreknowledge of the hijacker plots, and the Bush-Cheney administration’s coverup of inconvenient 9/11 truths — also are routinely blacked out by the mainstream media.

But in the wake of this Epstein bombshell, now, the C-word (as in ‘conspiracy’) is even creeping into the prose of NY Times columnists like Paul Krugman. Sometimes the criminality at the top of America becomes so brazen, so obvious that even our press watchdogs are stirred from their slumber.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig