The
extent of Israeli spying directed against the United States is a huge story that
is
only rarely addressed in the mainstream media. The Jewish state regularly
tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that aggressively conduct
espionage against the U.S. and Jewish American Jonathan Pollard, who was
imprisoned in 1987 for spying for Israel, is now regarded as the most damaging
spy in the history of the United States.
Mr. Epstein is routinely described as a billionaire and brilliant financier, and he rubbed elbows with the powerful, including former and future presidents. Even after his 2008 guilty plea in a prostitution case in Florida,
he promoted himself as a financial wizard who used arcane mathematical
models, and he often dropped the names of Nobel Prize-winning friends.
He told potential clients that they had to invest a minimum of $1
billion. At his peak in the early 2000s, a magazine profile said he
employed 150 people, some working out of the historic Villard Houses on
Madison Avenue.Much of that appears to be an illusion, and there is little evidence that Mr. Epstein is a billionaire.
Mr. Epstein, who was charged this month
with sex trafficking of teenage girls, liked to portray himself as a
financial wizard, someone whose business and investing acumen made him
indispensable to corporate executives and other leaders. But there is
little evidence to support that notion. The financial services that Mr. Epstein dispensed appear to have been mostly pedestrian, and his list of clients small.Mr. Epstein nonetheless managed to affix himself to a handful of prominent Wall Street veterans, including Mr. Staley, who is now chief executive of the British bank Barclays.
Almost exactly a year ago, on Aug. 16, 2018, I visited Jeffrey Epstein at his cavernous Manhattan mansion.The
overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute
conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich,
famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed
to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging
or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual
proclivities and recreational drug use.
Attorney General William P. Barr said on Monday that there were “serious
irregularities” at the federal jail in Manhattan where Jeffrey Epstein,
the financier who was long dogged by accusations of sexual abuse of
girls, was found dead on Saturday morning after he had apparently hanged himself.
Jeffrey Epstein, the politically connected financier charged recently
with sexually abusing dozens of young girls in the early 2000s, died
Saturday after apparently hanging himself in a Manhattan cell, officials
said, sparking outrage among victims who hoped to one day confront him
in court and triggering multiple investigations into what happened.
He demanded sex three times a day. A parade of powerful figures visited
his private estates, which were adorned with pictures of naked girls and
stocked with sex toys. And the schedules of teenagers on call to give
him massages at his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion were documented in phone
messages from his assistants.
A pathologist hired by Jeffrey Epstein’s brother is now backing the conspiracy theory that the accused child sex trafficker might’ve died by homicide — not suicide — in his Manhattan jail cell in August.