ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. Or maybe he did. Who knows. Either way, you’re asking the wrong question.

Even Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and longtime Epstein conspiracy evangelist, recently turned FBI deputy director, now sounds tired of addressing whether, in 2019, the American financier and notorious child sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, really did himself in with his prison bedsheet while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. “He’s the only person in there and the only person coming out,” Bongino told Fox News a few days ago.

Sure, except for the conveniently broken cameras, missing footage and the fact that not one working lens in that New York City jail captured Epstein’s cell door, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report from 2023. But honestly? Dare I say it — who cares.

I can hear the gasps already. If someone else somehow did him in, then it would prove that someone powerful didn’t ever want him to talk. And that would provide a clue as to their identity. Maybe. But also, so what?

We already know plenty. Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell: the British media tycoon and owner of the Mirror Group newspapers, who “accidentally” launched himself off his yacht near Spain’s Canary Islands in 1991. British intelligence had long suspected him of playing footsie under the table with Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy service, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph. His widow told Vanity Fair in the year after his death that all his perceived enthusiasm for Israel was just a branding ploy to score Manhattan business cred. Still, he was buried in Jerusalem. Did he need the business posthumously?

As the Washington Post put it in 1991: “Israel gives Maxwell farewell fit for a hero.” Hero of what, exactly? In Gordon Thomas and Robert Dillon's 2003 book "Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul,” the authors allege that Maxwell sold backdoored Israeli software to American nuclear labs like Sandia and Los Alamos, and to other major government and financial institutions, not just in America but worldwide. Intelligence goldmine: unlocked.

If compromising was the family business, then Maxwell’s daughter and Epstein scaled it like a global luxury empire, complete with velvet ropes and underage bait.

Now ask yourself: If you wanted to control powerful people, would you really need bombs or ballots? Or would sex, cash and a well-placed hidden camera do the trick? The Daily Beast noted that Epstein “hired men to monitor what was happening in his New York mansion from a CCTV control room.”

Sounds like a live-action kompromat factory with foot rubs on the side.

Epstein wasn’t just an abuser with a Rolodex. It sounds like he was a walking honeypot operation. But for whom or what?

He met with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “dozens of times,” including flights on the infamous jet between 2013 and 2017, according to the Times of Israel. Their little tech startup project? It’s now thriving in the U.S. And it just so happened to be founded by alums of Israel’s Unit 8200 and top defense and political officials.

That’s the part no one wants to touch: how many of these honeypot-linked ventures, dripping with foreign intel DNA, have found a comfy home in America’s digital and political bloodstream? How many are digital panopticons serving foreign interests?

Everyone’s so busy asking which suit may have had a “massage” from a trafficked teenager, or who might’ve murdered Epstein, as if that’s the scandal. The real power move isn’t in the blackmail footage. It’s in what exactly that footage enabled. On close examination, it all seems more like a system of leverage in the service of intelligence collection than a sex ring.

Meanwhile, Washington loves to play the role of anti-foreign-influence crusader. Last year, Foreign Policy magazine gave Trump’s Justice Department from his first administration a pat on the back for finally “beating back foreign influence networks” for the first time in decades.

But there’s one influencer that everyone pretends not to notice.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio just announced visa bans for foreign officials who censor their citizens' free speech. How noble. Unless, of course, that speech happens to be exercised about Israel, in which case you might find yourself deported from the U.S., mid-degree, just like the Tufts University Fulbright scholar who co-wrote an op-ed about Gaza. Apparently, articulating what much of the world is now saying is grounds for deportation.

Wonder if anyone watching at home has asked themselves, “Geez, what do they have on that guy?” Another question might be, what do they have on you, as a result of politicians being afraid to speak up?

Epstein may be long gone, and real questions remain. But they should focus on who benefited from his activities, not on who yanked the bedsheet. Following this unbeaten path doesn’t lead to a jail cell in New York, but rather to boardrooms, tech startups and intelligence outposts operating comfortably under the radar with apparent impunity.