Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI
When the FBI raided Jeffrey Epstein's homes in Manhattan and the US Virgin Islands, they seized more than 70 computers, iPads, and hard drives. They took boxes of shredded paper and financial documents. In a cabinet underneath a bookshelf in Epstein's Manhattan mansion, they found a large plastic bin full of hard drives. They sawed open a metal safe and found inside it a binder full of CDs and even more hard drives.
This material, taken in 2019, forms the bulk of the Epstein files. The vast corpus of evidence has assumed an almost mythic status in recent weeks as questions swirl about Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and his rich and powerful associates. The full release of the files could answer legitimate questions about how Epstein escaped accountability for trafficking and abusing young girls, the sources of his wealth, failures surrounding his death, and the nature of his relationships to powerful people with intelligence ties, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and CIA Director William Burns.
The unanswered questions have left room for wild speculation. At its most lurid, the unsubstantiated theory goes that Epstein pimped out teenage girls as part of a blackmail operation at the behest of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, and was murdered in his jail cell to ensure he took his secrets to his grave.
If Epstein had anything to do with intelligence agencies, one might expect some hint of it to show up in all these files.
Four people who had access to the records seized by the FBI say they found nothing to indicate that Epstein had any role with US or foreign intelligence. There's no sign that evidence was removed because it contained classified or sensitive information, they said. There was no mention of intelligence ties in court records or during the five-week trial of Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of trafficking girls to Epstein for sex.
"Nothing supports the contention that there was either a honeypot blackmail scheme or any association with intelligence," one of the people with access to the seized records told Business Insider.
Of course, had Epstein been working as an intelligence asset in some fashion, it's possible that there would be no trace of that in the seized records. "If you are working for the government — providing information to the government — that relationship is something that neither party necessarily wants to casually be discovered," says Adam Hickey, a former top official in the Department of Justice's national security division.
Hickey, who oversaw counterintelligence, espionage, and foreign computer hacking cases, had no involvement with the Epstein and Maxwell prosecutions. But he and other national security law experts told Business Insider it's notable that neither Epstein nor Maxwell raised intelligence connections in their defense.
"You would expect him to want to prove that what he was doing was because the government sent him out to do it," Hickey says. "That would be fodder for a defense."
The Trump administration's recent backpedaling on a promise to release more documents from the Justice Department's Epstein files has reignited long-standing suspicions that the government is hiding details of Epstein's crimes and protecting his many powerful and influential associates.
FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, pushed for the release of the "Epstein files" before joining the administration, claiming the government was participating in a cover-up. The idea that Epstein had some kind of intelligence role has been promoted by Steve Bannon, who recorded hours of interviews with Epstein in the months before his death.
In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi published several hundred pages of documents from the Justice Department's trove, which she described as "Phase One" of the release. All but three pages had been made public years earlier. In some documents, the Justice Department bizarrely added new redactions to already-public records. (The Justice Department has denied Business Insider's FOIA requests for many of the files; the denials are being appealed. Justice Department representatives didn't respond to requests for comment.)
This month, the Justice Department released a two-page memo announcing that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." Elon Musk, who left his government role in June in an ugly split with Trump, has led calls for the full release of the Epstein files, saying on X that doing so would be a priority for his new political party. MAGA-friendly pundits, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have pushed the theory — based on connect-the-dots leaps of logic — that Epstein was working for the Mossad.
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi informed President Donald Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files, though it's not clear in what context. Trump and Epstein were friendly in the 1990s, before Epstein registered as a sex offender.
On Thursday and Friday, Justice Department officials met with Maxwell near the Florida prison where she's serving a 20-year sentence.
Theories about Epstein are rooted in mistrust: Epstein's life and death represent failures of the institutions that were supposed to bring him to justice.
The conspiracy theories around intelligence make hay of his connections without offering much evidence beyond them. They note, for instance, that Ghislaine Maxwell's father, the late British business tycoon Robert Maxwell, is widely believed to have worked for Israeli intelligence. Barak visited Epstein's Manhattan townhouse on multiple occasions after Barak left office — something the former prime minister later said he regretted — and Epstein was an investor in one of Barak's companies. Burns also met multiple times with Epstein while he was deputy Secretary of State, but before he led the CIA. A CIA spokesperson said the meetings were arranged so that Epstein could offer Burns career advice.
If he had had any connection to any governmental agency whatsoever, I would be the first person to know about it.Alan Dershowitz, former Epstein defense attorney
Two specific claims that are often cited to make the case that Epstein was an intelligence asset have been contradicted.
The first comes from a 2019 opinion column in the Daily Beast written by journalist Vicky Ward. According to Ward, Alex Acosta, the Florida prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal in the mid-2000s that allowed him to serve a light jail sentence despite law enforcement's belief that he had abused dozens of girls, was asked about the case during his vetting to be named labor secretary during the first Trump administration. "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," Acosta said, according to Ward's anonymous source.
Acosta said the opposite when he spoke to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility for a report published in 2020. Asked whether he had knowledge of Epstein being "an intelligence asset," Acosta told them, "the answer is no."
Acosta's response was buried in a footnote on page 169 of the 348-page report and was not widely seen. Acosta declined to comment for this story. "I was told what I was told and the person who's told it to me has never backtracked from it," Ward told Business Insider.
Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein in the Florida case, told Business Insider that Epstein told him he didn't have ties to intelligence agencies. "He said 'absolutely no.' He said he wished he did, that it would've been very helpful" to get an even better deal, Dershowitz says. "If he had had any connection to any governmental agency whatsoever, I would be the first person to know about it."
One of Epstein's accusers, Virginia Giuffre, accused Dershowitz of abuse, but later withdrew the allegation and said she "may have made a mistake." Dershowitz has called for the public release of the Epstein files. "They would distinguish between true accusations and false accusations," he said.
The second claim involves the existence of videos — filmed for the benefit of Epstein's intelligence handlers, the theory goes — showing Epstein's friends having sex with underage girls. Epstein's victims have said he told them he had cameras throughout his homes. The specific claim that Epstein was recording sexual acts involving his associates comes from statements that Sarah Ransome, one of Epstein's accusers, made in 2016. Ransome later admitted that she made it up. "I was absolutely terrified that, once I went public with my story, Jeffrey and Ghislaine would find and kill me," Ransome wrote in her 2021 memoir.
If the seized Epstein documents contained any whiff of intelligence ties, there are several ways that could have shown up.
Typically, when Justice Department prosecutors suspect a US intelligence agency, such as the CIA or NSA, might have information pertinent to a criminal case they're investigating, they will make a request for a prudential review, also called a prudential search, experts in national security law said.
"Epstein had one condition: he wanted assurances that the SDNY did not see him as a rapist. That was the end of that. He was a rapist, and we were not about to give him some other, more polite-sounding label."Geoffrey Berman, former US attorney
"The prudential review is where you kick the tires and make sure there's nothing that the intelligence community has that is going to make it impossible or unethical for you to bring your case because you can't comply with your discovery obligations because the information is classified," says Hickey, who's now a defense attorney with the firm Mayer Brown.
There's no indication that a prudential review ever took place, according to the four people who had access to the records seized by the FBI.
In Epstein's case, the reason for this might have come down to timing, two of his lawyers told BI: His death, mere weeks after his arrest, meant there wasn't much time to process the evidence against him. "Because Epstein died very early on, the government had produced little discovery and our primary initial focus was bail," one of those lawyers in the 2019 case, Marc Fernich, told Business Insider.
In his memoir, Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney who oversaw the case against Epstein, wrote that his team never met with Epstein's defense team to discuss the possibility of a plea deal. "Epstein had one condition: he wanted assurances that the SDNY did not see him as a rapist," Berman wrote. "That was the end of that. He was a rapist, and we were not about to give him some other, more polite-sounding label."
There's also no indication that a prudential review was requested in the case against Maxwell, which involved much of the same evidence collected for Epstein's prosecution, the four people said. A representative for the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York and an attorney for Maxwell declined to comment.
In addition, there's no record of evidence being removed for national security reasons.
For prosecutors to remove certain pieces of evidence, to avoid exposing sensitive intelligence to defense attorneys, they would need to file motions under the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. The motions would be noted on the public court docket, experts said. "The way things normally happen is that there would be some tell in the docket that you're dealing with these issues, and the court knows about it through CIPA," says Hickey.
CIPA was enacted in 1980 to make it easier to prosecute people with intelligence ties. Until then, legal experts say, defendants with such ties could use the threat of exposing government secrets — "graymail," as it was called — to avoid prosecution.
"Before CIPA, basically nobody would ever prosecute CIA officers because they would always pull this shit," says Kel McClanahan, a national security attorney and law professor at George Washington University.
BI's search of the docket for the federal cases against Epstein or Maxwell found no mention of CIPA litigation. No member of Maxwell's high-powered defense team — which included lawyers who have worked on cases involving terrorists and international drug traffickers — asked the judge to order prosecutors to conduct a prudential search of intelligence agency material.
If it's true that there was never a search for government secrets or arguments for pulling evidence, and if no links to intelligence ever emerged from extensive reviews of the Epstein files, it does not "definitively remove the question" of an intelligence role, McClanahan says.
But it's a "pretty damn convincing" sign, he says.
Jacob Shamsian is a correspondent on Business Insider's Legal Affairs desk.
