On the morning I began writing this article, February 19, 2026, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, was arrested by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It was his 66th birthday. Andrew spent his birthday in custody before being released under investigation. His alleged crime. forwarding confidential British government documents to Jeffrey Epstein.
The arrest is historic. Frankly, I was surprised by it, not because I didn’t think he was criminally involved, but because the last time a royal of such high rank was arrested in the UK was more than three centuries ago. My hat’s off to the modern Brits.
The arrest appears to be well deserved.
In my previous analysis of the January 2026 Epstein document release, I argued that the fixation on Epstein as a sex trafficker mischaracterizes the nature of his enterprise. He was running an information operation. The young women were instruments of access and leverage—not the purpose of the operation.
The recently released DOJ files and the criminal investigations now unfolding in the United Kingdom confirm that thesis with examples that were previously unavailable. We now have named individuals, dated emails, and documented patterns of information being provided to Epstein from the innermost corridors of Western governmental and financial institutions.
This article adds three dimensions that my earlier analysis introduced but did not fully develop: the role of the MEGA Group as the context for Epstein’s intelligence function; the financial scale of the operation, as documented in suppressed bank records; and the logic of suppression—why governments, rather than just individuals, have an interest in ensuring that the full picture never emerges.
Before cataloguing the specific cases now documented in the files, it is worth restating my analysis. In classic intelligence tradecraft, a honeytrap operation follows a distinct structure. The first phase is access — cultivating a genuine social relationship with the target through whatever means work: lavish entertainment, introductions to desirable people, personal attention, gifts, or simply being the most interesting and useful person in the room.
The goal is a friendship that the target values and wants to maintain.
The second phase runs concurrently and is less visible: compromising the target. This means inducing him to do or say things that would be ruinous if they became public — and then documenting them. The most reliable mechanism, and Epstein’s signature method, was providing ready access to attractive escorts willing to do whatever was asked, while surveillance systems captured everything. Once a target has crossed a line — accepted a favor he cannot explain, engaged in conduct he cannot defend, done something illegal or merely career-ending — the operator owns him. No threats need to be issued. No explicit demands need to be made. The target understands the arrangement intuitively, and the favor-exchange relationship that follows feels, to him, entirely voluntary. The target becomes, in effect, a puppet who believes he is still pulling his own strings.
Epstein’s operation tracked with this model. His properties were equipped with extensive surveillance systems after Ghislaine Maxwell entered his life. His recruitment and deployment of women followed the pattern of a trained intelligence apparatus rather than an opportunistic criminal’s improvisation. And now—critically—we can document that the leverage he secured was converted into a stream of sensitive government and financial intelligence.
The key distinction between an information operation and ordinary corruption is this: in ordinary corruption, powerful men do favors for wealthy patrons in exchange for money. In an information operation, they provide information—because the information itself is what the operator values. Many of Epstein’s sources appear to have believed they were maintaining a friendship with a well-connected financier. The emails reveal something more calculated on his end.
The most significant gap in most Epstein coverage is the failure to provide context. Epstein did not build this network alone, from scratch, as a self-financed entrepreneur. He was, from the beginning of his rise, operating within a network that provided him with capital, connections, infrastructure, and, almost certainly, direction.
After leaving his Wall Street job, Epstein got his start by tracking stolen money and helping the wealthy avoid taxes. But the network that eventually coalesced around Epstein was centered on Leslie Wexner and the MEGA Group.
The MEGA Group was founded in 1991 by Wexner and Charles Bronfman, described publicly as a secretive club of approximately twenty of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen, with membership dues, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 1998, upwards of $30,000 per year. Its stated purpose involved pro-Israel philanthropy—the group was instrumental in founding or funding Birthright Israel, the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, and the renewal of Hillel International. But the group’s ambitions extended well beyond philanthropy.
According to a former NSA counterintelligence official, John Schindler, who examined the group’s role in a published analysis, MEGA was viewed by Israeli intelligence officials as a channel for espionage and influence in the United States. The group’s members, by virtue of being among the largest political donors in both the United States and Israel, had access to both governments and their intelligence communities that few private organizations could match.
The mission, as articulated by members of the group, was explicitly governmental: advancing Israel’s interests by influencing US foreign policy, particularly on Middle East issues. Max Fisher, a founding member and Wexner’s mentor, had served as an informal presidential adviser on Middle East policy from Eisenhower through George W. Bush—deliberately avoiding formal appointments that would have required Senate confirmation and FBI background checks, as I documented in my previous analysis of the Mega Group’s organized crime connections.
In 1987, Jeffrey Epstein entered this network. That year, Wexner became Epstein’s exclusive financial client, granting him power of attorney over his finances and, by 1991—the same year MEGA was founded—full control of the Wexner financial empire. Wexner transferred to Epstein a $77 million Manhattan mansion outfitted with surveillance cameras, along with properties in Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the Virgin Islands. Epstein’s network was, in substantial part, built with Wexner’s resources.
The question that demands an answer, and that the DOJ’s document release has conspicuously failed to address, is this: what was Epstein providing to Wexner and the MEGA Group in return? How did a college dropout with no formal financial education become retained as a billionaire’s sole financial manager? What unique investment acumen and character traits warranted such trust?
The pattern we see in Epstein’s activities—an intelligence operation gathering sensitive information from compromised elites—is precisely the kind of service a group dedicated to influencing governments would find invaluable. Information is the currency of influence. Epstein’s operation was an information-production enterprise, and the MEGA Group was positioned to be its primary customer.
The Israeli government’s involvement in the operation is now documented. The 2026 document release includes materials indicating that Israeli government personnel—specifically connected to the Israeli consulate—conducted security operations at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment, including background checks on visitors. A senior Israeli intelligence agent, identified in the released materials as Yoni Koren, resided at the apartment for extended periods between 2013 and 2015. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made dozens of visits to Epstein’s properties and co-founded with Epstein a technology company, Carbyne, staffed by veterans of Israeli intelligence services.
Most significantly, a 2020 FBI memorandum, cited by a confidential source, states that Epstein was trained as a spy and relayed information to Mossad through intermediaries, including, allegedly, phone calls with Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. The Drop Site News investigative series, published in late 2025, documented that Epstein secretly brokered a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia and separately established a backchannel between Israel and Russia during the Syrian civil war—activities that go far beyond any private financial interest and are consistent only with Epstein operating in an intelligence capacity for Israeli interests.
Robert Maxwell—Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—was a confirmed Mossad asset who died under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained in 1991, the same year Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney. Maxwell had introduced Epstein to a network of international intelligence relationships before his death. His daughter then entered Epstein’s operation and managed the systematic recruitment and trafficking of young women—the core of the honeytrap mechanism.
The record establishes that Epstein was not an independent operator. He was an intelligence asset embedded within and supported by a network whose explicit purpose was to influence governments on behalf of Israeli interests, and whose members had documented ties to organized crime networks that provided the logistics and the culture of impunity that allowed the operation to run for three decades.
The strongest evidence that Epstein’s operation extended far beyond the handful of known named targets is the financial record—specifically, the Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) that JPMorgan Chase suppressed for sixteen years before finally filing them after Epstein’s death.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, financial institutions are legally required to file a Suspicious Activity Report with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network within thirty days of detecting any transaction that appears designed to evade reporting requirements, involves suspected money laundering, or otherwise signals criminal activity. Failure to comply is a federal violation carrying civil penalties of up to $25,000 per day for each continuing violation, criminal fines of up to $250,000, and imprisonment of up to five years for responsible officers and employees.
The numbers in Epstein’s suspect transactions are extraordinary. JPMorgan, which served Epstein from 1998 through 2013, flagged $4.3 million in suspicious transactions from Epstein’s accounts while he was alive—a tiny fraction of his activity. One month after Epstein died in federal custody in August 2019, the bank conducted a retroactive review and filed SARs covering approximately 4,700 to 5,000 transactions totaling $1.1 to $1.3 billion—nearly 300 times the amount it had reported while Epstein was actively using the accounts.
This was not a compliance error. Senator Ron Wyden, whose Finance Committee investigated the matter exhaustively, characterized it as deliberate: bank executives coaching Epstein on how to structure withdrawals to avoid detection, intervening to suppress internal compliance alerts, and waiting six years after terminating Epstein as a client before filing a single report.
And JPMorgan was only one of four banks. Congressional investigations identified more than $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions across JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Bank of New York Mellon—none of which filed timely reports as required by the Bank Secrecy Act.
Consider what $1.3 billion in human trafficking-related transactions reveals — and what it cannot explain. In federal court proceedings, the Virgin Islands’ legal team cited a figure of several hundred dollars per sexual encounter, based on Epstein’s documented payment patterns. No plausible per-encounter rate — whether hundreds or thousands of dollars — can account for $1.3 billion over sixteen years without producing numbers that strain credulity. The money was not primarily paid for sexual encounters. It was financing something larger, and the nature of most of those transactions remains deliberately hidden.
If he spent that much money as part of his ongoing enterprise, how much did he make from it? What was the return? It had to be substantial.
Even if all the allegations against Prince Andrew, Peter Mandelson, and Bill Gates are accurate, they represent a tiny fraction of the clientele that such a financial footprint implies. The $65 million in wire transfers from Wexner’s trusts, the $170 million from Leon Black, and the other large transactions identified in the 2019 SAR filing are individually significant but, taken together, insufficient to account for the full $1.3 billion. The recipients of the remaining transactions are, with very few exceptions, still unknown.
Their names appear in those bank records. Congress has sought to obtain them. In September 2025, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee blocked a Democratic motion to subpoena the financial records from all four banks.
Why?
The people who controlled those financial records, or who stood to be identified by them, had sufficient influence over the political process to block the subpoenas. The suppression of the SARs while Epstein was alive, the retroactive filing only after his death, and the subsequent blocking of Congressional subpoenas form a continuous pattern of institutional protection that extends to both political parties.
The most consequential case so far to emerge from the January 30, 2026, document release—and the one that triggered last Thursday’s historic arrest—involves Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor during his tenure as the United Kingdom’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment.
The released emails document a pattern in which the former prince forwarded official government reports on his overseas trade visits to Epstein within minutes of receiving them. One email thread dated November 30, 2010, shows Mountbatten-Windsor forwarding a report from his special adviser to Epstein covering trade visits to Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. A second exchange the following month appears to describe what Mountbatten-Windsor called a ‘confidential brief’ on potential investment opportunities in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. In this region, British military forces were then active.
A member of the British royal family, serving in an official government trade capacity, was forwarding restricted government assessments—including information about potential investments in a combat zone—to a private financier with documented ties to multiple intelligence services. Whether Mountbatten-Windsor understood the significance of his actions is a question for the criminal investigation now underway. That the information was valuable to an operator of Epstein’s kind is not in doubt.
Thames Valley Police confirmed a formal investigation on February 9, 2026, and executed the arrest on February 19th. Searches continued at properties in Berkshire and Norfolk.
Misconduct in public office in the United Kingdom carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The Mandelson case is, in some respects, more consequential than Mountbatten-Windsor’s because it involves multiple categories of improper sharing of sensitive information with Epstein over several years, including information about the most significant economic policy decisions in decades.
In June 2009, while serving as Business Secretary, Mandelson appears to have forwarded to Epstein details of internal proposals to sell off UK government assets as part of the Treasury’s crisis response—information whose value to someone like Epstein was immediate. In late 2009, emails show Mandelson and Epstein developing a strategy to push back against the UK government’s proposed banker bonus supertax—working against his own government’s policy on behalf of the financial sector. In March 2010, he assisted Epstein and JPMorgan’s Jes Staley in lobbying US Treasury official Larry Summers against proposed American banking restrictions—a serving British Cabinet minister helping a convicted sex offender lobby American financial regulators on behalf of a US bank.
On May 9, 2010, Mandelson emailed Epstein to inform him that the European Union’s €500 billion Eurozone rescue facility would be ‘announced tonight.’ The announcement came the following day, triggering the euro’s largest rally in two years. On May 10, Mandelson informed Epstein that Gordon Brown had resigned as Prime Minister.
Tax attorney Dan Neidle summarized the pattern: Mandelson was not just leaking sensitive UK government information to Epstein. He was leaking US government secrets, essentially to Wall Street as well. In light of the MEGA Group’s documented interest in influencing governments on financial and foreign policy matters, the significance of this information to Epstein and his clients is obvious.
Bank records show three payments totaling $75,000 to accounts linked to Mandelson between 2003 and 2004. In 2009, after his conviction, Epstein paid $10,000 toward the education of his partner’s child. The Metropolitan Police opened a criminal investigation on February 3, 2026. Mandelson has resigned from the Labour Party and the House of Lords.
Not every method of acquiring information in Epstein’s network required compromising material. The Kathleen J. Ruemmler case illustrates another approach: cultivating trust relationships through gifts, social access, and career assistance, which created informal channels for acquiring sensitive information without explicit coercion.
Ruemmler, who served as White House Counsel to President Obama from 2011 to 2014 and later as Chief Legal Officer of Goldman Sachs, maintained extensive correspondence with Epstein from 2014 through January 2019. The correspondence included substantial gift-giving, a personal relationship, and a pattern of seeking his advice on sensitive professional matters. Most relevant, in 2014, as a story broke suggesting that, as White House Counsel, she had suppressed evidence of a member of the White House advance team’s involvement in the 2012 Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia, she turned to Epstein for crisis management assistance. She forwarded him a draft email containing non-public details of the White House Counsel’s office’s role in investigating the scandal and sought his advice on media strategy.
Bloomberg reported last week that the documents show Ruemmler sharing with Epstein detailed behind-the-scenes information about the White House’s handling of a sensitive law enforcement matter—information that, in the hands of an intelligence operative with interests in US political intelligence, would have obvious value.
Ruemmler’s case illustrates why Epstein’s operation cannot be understood as primarily a blackmail network. He was, in many cases, the person powerful people called when they needed to quietly manage problems. The information he acquired was a natural byproduct of that relationship, and the relationship was deliberately cultivated to obtain it.
Ruemmler announced her planned resignation from Goldman Sachs on February 12, 2026, effective June 30th.
The cases above illustrate the ‘voluntary’ dimension of Epstein’s information acquisition. The Gates materials document the coercive dimension—the conversion of compromising information into financial and reputational leverage.
In May 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein attempted to blackmail Gates over his alleged 2010 affair with Russian bridge player Mila Antonova. After Gates sought to end the relationship, Epstein emailed him in 2017, as the Journal reported, using a tone that made clear Epstein knew about the affair and could expose it. He demanded reimbursement for Antonova’s coding school tuition—a modest financial request that primarily served to establish that he had leverage and was willing to use it.
The January 2026 document release included the draft emails Epstein wrote to himself in July 2013, detailing his claimed services to Gates: facilitating access to women, obtaining medications to conceal a sexually transmitted disease, and other arrangements described as ranging from morally inappropriate to potentially illegal. Gates’s representatives have categorically denied all of these allegations. Yet the documents’ value is independent of their literal truth. They reveal Epstein’s method for constructing leverage files—detailed, specific, and including the kind of personal information that only someone with surveillance capabilities or intimate access could possess. Whether the content was accurate or partly fabricated, the file was designed to function as blackmail material, and the demand that followed demonstrates that it did.
The Gates case also illustrates a pattern that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explicitly identified in October 2025 when he called Epstein ‘the greatest blackmailer ever.’ Epstein sold himself as a fixer—solving problems for the wealthy and powerful that they could not resolve through official channels. The fixing created the compromising information. That information created the leverage. That leverage was then exercised, not always for money, but to maintain access that kept the information flowing.
The financial record raises a question that the released documents conspicuously fail to answer: if $1.3 billion in transactions were flowing through Epstein’s accounts at a single bank over sixteen years, and the identified recipients—Wexner, Black, Dershowitz, Dubin, and others named in the 2019 SAR—account for only a fraction of that total, who received the rest?
The mathematics of the known cases cannot explain the scale. Even under the most generous interpretation of documented payments—Wexner’s $65 million in trust transfers, Black’s $170 million, and assorted payments to known associates—the majority of the $1.3 billion at JPMorgan alone remains unaccounted for. Add the hundreds of millions at Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Bank of New York Mellon, and the unaccounted-for sum grows substantially. Across four banks, Congress identified over $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions.
An operation of this financial scale, sustained over this period, implies a clientele and a network of recipients orders of magnitude larger than the public record currently reflects. The ‘over 1,000 victims’ figure repeatedly cited by the DOJ—itself likely a significant undercount—is consistent with a network extending far beyond a circle of glamorous elites. The procurement networks documented in the files—Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 modeling agency, Massimo Parisi’s Baltic Model Management, and the pipelines that brought young women from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere to Epstein’s properties—were industrial-scale operations that required industrial-scale funding and an industrial-scale clientele.
These unknown clients almost certainly include not only wealthy private individuals but also officials in multiple domestic and foreign governments. Epstein’s documented operational geography spanned the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Virgin Islands, New Mexico, and Palm Beach; his documented relationships included figures from Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and multiple European governments. The recent documents include references to FBI files on Epstein’s ties to Chinese intelligence networks, his email warnings to Steve Bannon about the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, suggesting intimate knowledge of Chinese intelligence operations, and wire transfers to accounts at Russian banks Alfa Bank and Sberbank that the 2019 SAR specifically flagged.
An operation serving multiple intelligence services simultaneously—US, Israeli, and possibly others—would require a financial infrastructure of exactly the scale documented in the bank records. The sex trafficking was not incidental to this; it was the mechanism of access and the production method for the leverage that made the information operation possible. But the billions flowing through the accounts were not primarily the cost of the sex trafficking. They were the cost and the product of a multi-decade intelligence enterprise.
The Dershowitz case sits at the intersection of both the voluntary supply of information documented in the Ruemmler files and the coercive leverage documented in the Gates materials.
Alan Dershowitz has worked hard to minimize his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein to a single line: he was Epstein’s lawyer, he billed by the hour, and the money he received was legitimate legal compensation. The record shows that characterization to be untenable.
Dershowitz first appears in Epstein’s private jet flight logs in 1998 — seven years before he formally became Epstein’s attorney in mid-2005, following the Palm Beach police investigation. Between 1998 and his formal retention, the logs record multiple weekend trips to Epstein’s Palm Beach estate, attendance at private dinners in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, at least five domestic flight legs carrying Dershowitz between New York and Florida, and overseas segments to Paris and the Virgin Islands. Epstein’s “black book,” unsealed in later litigation, lists Dershowitz’s home address and private numbers — markers of social intimacy, not a professional referral.
Dershowitz has acknowledged receiving a massage at Epstein’s Palm Beach home during one of these visits, claiming it was provided by “an old Russian woman” and that his daughter and granddaughters were present and also received massages. This is a man attempting to explain away his presence at the home of a convicted sex offender.
The explanation raises more questions than it answers. What legal representation, exactly, covered a decade of social travel on a private jet to a client’s island and overseas residences before that client was charged?
The financial record compounds the problem. A forensic accountant’s report filed in federal court and subsequently reported by Bloomberg established that Epstein paid Dershowitz a total of $4 million, with approximately $1 million disbursed to other attorneys and researchers, leaving Dershowitz a net of roughly $3 million. At his documented billing rates of $1,000 to $2,000 per hour, $3 million represents between 1,500 and 3,000 billable hours — a figure that, even spread across the years of representation, implies a level of time investment and involvement that goes well beyond the negotiation of a single plea agreement.
But the payment that most directly contradicts Dershowitz’s public position is not the cash. It is the Lexus. Bloomberg’s reporting on newly released email correspondence confirmed that Epstein gave a new Lexus to Dershowitz’s wife as a gift. Dershowitz’s explanation: it was part of his legal fee because his wife drove Epstein around.
This is not how hourly legal billing works. An attorney who bills by the hour does not receive luxury vehicles for family members as compensation for professional services. A vehicle given to a lawyer’s wife is a gift — the kind Epstein routinely used to establish leverage over people he intended to keep close and compromise.
When asked by the New York Times about the JPMorgan SAR naming him in over $1 billion in flagged transactions, Dershowitz stated: “The only funds I ever received from Jeffrey Epstein were payments for my legal services based on my hourly rates.” The Lexus parked in the driveway raises a credibility problem with that statement, which he has never been asked to address publicly.
There is one additional piece of evidence that Dershowitz himself placed in the public record, apparently without recognizing what it disclosed. In his 2013 book “Taking the Stand,” Dershowitz described attending a private luncheon at a Martha’s Vineyard home hosted by President Bill Clinton and Caroline Kennedy — most likely in August 1993, twelve years before he became Epstein’s attorney. During lunch, Clinton’s phone rang. He excused himself, spoke privately for about fifteen minutes, then returned to the table, handed Dershowitz the phone, and said: “Alan, Jeff wants to say hello.”
Dershowitz described the exchange as an “awkward hello.” Why was it awkward? What had Epstein discussed with the President for fifteen minutes? Why did Epstein specifically ask to speak with Dershowitz? And why did Dershowitz, a man who has spent four decades crafting careful public statements about everything connected to Epstein, include this anecdote in his own memoir?
The answer may be that in 2013, before Epstein’s full crimes were known, the story read as a flattering illustration of Dershowitz’s access to power. Read today, against the backdrop of Epstein’s documented intelligence operation and his systematic cultivation of influence across American political and legal life, it reads as something else entirely: confirmation that Dershowitz was embedded in Epstein’s social network at the highest levels years before he became Epstein’s lawyer — and that the legal representation, when it came, formalized a relationship whose true nature has never been fully examined.
My three-part analysis of the Epstein case last summer concluded that the government’s failure to investigate and prosecute properly could not be explained by incompetence or isolated corruption—it required intervention by an intelligence agency. The pattern of events since then strengthens rather than weakens that conclusion.
The DOJ’s systematic violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act—redacting government officials’ names in direct contravention of the statute’s explicit language, having the FBI pre-redact files before transmitting them to the AG’s office to create plausible deniability, removing the bulk download capability to impede systematic analysis, and forcing Congressional members to review unredacted files in a DOJ reading room without staff or devices—is not the behavior of an agency trying to comply with a law it finds inconvenient. It is the behavior of an institution protecting an interest.
That interest is not merely the protection of wealthy private individuals, though that is certainly one dimension. The deeper interest is the protection of governments—multiple governments—that benefited from Epstein’s information operation and that have strong reasons to ensure that neither the full clientele nor the full intelligence product ever becomes public.
Consider what full disclosure would require acknowledging: that serving officials of the British government provided classified trade and policy intelligence to a convicted sex offender who was operating as an intelligence asset for a foreign power; that a senior official in the Obama White House shared non-public information about sensitive law enforcement matters with the same individual; that a Wall Street-connected operative received market-moving advance knowledge of the Eurozone bailout; and that the financial structure of the entire operation was maintained by four of the nation’s largest banks despite sixteen years of internal red flags and explicit knowledge of the trafficking operation.
And that all of this was known, at some level, to intelligence agencies that chose to protect the operation rather than dismantle it.
If the full picture were disclosed, it would not merely destroy careers; it would destroy lives. It would raise fundamental questions about the relationship between Western intelligence services and organized crime networks, the extent to which financial regulation was deliberately compromised for intelligence purposes, and the degree to which democratic governments have been making policy under the influence of an operation specifically designed to manipulate them. The institutional cost of those disclosures vastly exceeds the cost of continuing to suppress them. That is the logic that explains why the suppression has continued through multiple administrations, across both political parties, and in the face of explicit Congressional mandates.
It is a remarkable commentary on the state of accountability in the Western world that the most consequential criminal actions to emerge from the Epstein operation have come not from the United States—where Epstein operated, where his financial operation was centered, and where the DOJ holds the documents—but from the United Kingdom, where criminal investigations are now underway against two former senior officials for leaking government information to Epstein.
Thames Valley Police opened its investigation into Mountbatten-Windsor on February 9 and arrested him on February 19. The Metropolitan Police opened its investigation into Mandelson on February 3. Both investigations concern misconduct in public office, a charge carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Both investigations were opened in direct response to evidence in the DOJ’s document release. The UK government supported both investigations and, in the case of Mandelson, provided the police with its own assessment that his emails contained ‘likely market-sensitive information’ that should not have been shared.
Why didn’t the US government share this information with the British years earlier?
By contrast, in the United States: no official has been investigated for providing information to Epstein; Congressional attempts to subpoena bank records have been blocked along party lines; the DOJ is in active violation of a federal transparency statute; and the response to requests for accountability from Kathy Ruemmler—who shared non-public White House information with Epstein—has been a resignation announcement on February 12, with her departure deferred to June 30, 2026, allowing her a four-and-a-half-month paid exit while the investigation continues.
The asymmetry is not coincidental. The United Kingdom’s intelligence establishment, despite its many failures in this case, does not appear to have had a direct stake in Epstein’s network, unlike US agencies. Former US Attorney Alexander Acosta’s reported statement that Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and that the matter was ‘above his pay grade’ was made in a specifically American context. The 2007 non-prosecution agreement’s extraordinary breadth—extending immunity to unnamed co-conspirators—was a product of the American federal system. The suppression of the SARs at four American banks was a domestic failure. The systematic violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is an ongoing federal crime in the United States.
The United Kingdom, despite the embarrassment the Epstein files have caused the British establishment, does not appear to be protecting an ongoing intelligence program. The United States does.
The cases documented here—Mountbatten-Windsor, Mandelson, Ruemmler, Gates, and the suppressed SARs—represent the visible surface of an enterprise whose full dimensions remain hidden. The named individuals do not account for the financial scale. The known intelligence connections do not exhaust the scope. The documented suppression does not fully explain itself without reference to interests that have not yet been identified in the public record.
My investigative principle has always been that facts require interpretation and truth needs an advocate. The facts now available are extraordinary. They demand an interpretive framework equal to their complexity—one that treats this not as a lurid celebrity scandal but as what the evidence indicates it was: a sustained, multi-decade intelligence penetration of Western democratic institutions, using sexual exploitation as its mechanism, organized crime networks as part of its logistical framework, and a network of compromised elites as its information sources.
The question every investigator, journalist, and legislator should be asking is not who Jeffrey Epstein knew. The relevant question is what the information he produced ultimately did—what policies it shaped, what decisions it influenced, what intelligence operations it fed, and which governments, today, remain the beneficiaries of what he built.
Until that question is answered, no one should be satisfied with what has been released. The files describe the mechanism. The mission remains in shadow. And the government officials who benefited from it remain in office.
