> Epstein wasn't even the first guy to come up with this idea. CIA did.
Sorry, but the CIA certainly did not invent sextortion either. That idea is probably older than the steam engine and should be blatantly obvious to any human with genitals and a brain. Heck, this should even be obvious for people working at a patent office.
> scrounge up their "lost" MKULTRA
assuming they haven't been deliberately destroyed.
> As long as we don't know, we can only assume the craziest conspiracy theories about treason and political control are true.
Also, please don't forget that times were different. I have whole book on crazy and ethically questionable research sitting on my shelf, and most of the MKULTRA shenanigans fit perfectly in there, along with a lot of the stuff that was done at the time.
One of the more memorable examples from the top of my head: In the early 1960s at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, alcoholics were injected Scoline while letting them sniff and taste some liquor. This completely blocked all muscle action, including the ability to breath[1]. The idea was to condition them to associate the panic and fear of imminent death with alcohol. This was done without the patients prior knowledge or informed consent. And have you ever even heard of that research before?
The main difference here is that the CIA had orders of magnitudes more funding and better shielding from consequences, thus the ability to take this much further.
I'm not trying to downplay MKULTRA here, what I'm trying to say is that you need to put the "What on earth were they thinking?" into a historical perspective, instead of jumping to "subverting their own government with mystery mind control" (well, foreign governments maybe, if it turns out to work; we are talking about the CIA after all).
I could easily imagine a meeting that went along the lines of "We must research this because the Russians might do so! We cannot have a mind control substance gap!", followed by "this needs to be super secret, we can't recruit volunteers.", and after throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks eventually spinning out of control because of morally corrupt people in positions with power and zero responsibilities ending up doing unethical things.
Also, if you are an organization in the US that does anything vaguely military/defense/intelligence related, I don't think you need to subvert the government to have money thrown at you (which conspiracy theories often seem to describe as the end game).
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/1961235a0