Hacker News Reader

Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it disturbing how we all just sort of stopped hearing about the Epstein case? Doesn't that reveal the stranglehold of censorship that powerful people have on the media, when there is a clear risk to their financial interests and reputations?

The story should have been headlining for a year as every sordid fact was uncovered, but people seem to have largely forgotten about it. Everyone seemed to be aligned against this person and what they did, but somehow the media didn't care much to dig into the details. I doubt your average person could mention more than a couple of high profile people that Epstein rubbed shoulders with (Likely "Trump" and "Bill Clinton").

View on HN

The whispers are that Epstein was in "intelligence" (CIA/Mossad/etc).

I assume those organizations can silence investigative journalism that would expose their inner workings.

Those whispers must be pretty quiet. Do you have any sources for this?

These whispers have been around for decades in certain circles, even before the weird Florida non-prosecution. The singularly most public, appropriately caveated, responsible discussion of this comes through Eric Weinstein, here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/25-the-construct-jeffr...

When Epstein was convicted the first time, in 2008, the prosecutor got told to let him go because he was a CIA asset. He got a deal that included only a few months in jail.

Alex Acosta told the Trump transition team that interviewed him that Epstein was 'intelligence' see: https://observer.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-spy-intelligenc... and many other sources besides.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr's father was involved in the Dalton School. (Edit: he was headmaster of Dalton School from 1964 to 1974).

Barr's father previously got Epstein a job teaching at the Dalton School.

Barr's father also wrote a creepy novel called Space Relations that involves a subplot of an enslaved teenager used to breed more slaves; there are other odd sexually charged subplots involving underaged girls as well.

Epstein discussed with others the idea of breeding many women... the coincidences sure seem odd, at the least.

"The U.S. Intelligence Community is lenient about the private habits of high-value agents or informants, but they won’t countenance running sex trafficking rings for minors on American soil, for years. While it’s plausible that Epstein was sharing some information with the FBI—many criminals do so to buy themselves some insurance—it’s implausible that he was mainly working for the Americans."

OK. So what I'm getting is that he wasn't working "mainly" for the Americans and even if he was, they wouldn't countenance running sex trafficking rings for minors on American soil, for years.

Given that, it doesn't make sense for "someone" to tell him Epstein "'belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”.

It's on wikipedia. It's circumstantial not a smoking gun, but it seems very clear Gislane Maxwell's dad was connected to Mossad.

My personal view is that Epstein was essentially a blackmailer, that was occasionally useful in passing information to intelligence agencies as a result of his activities.

How could this not be an Intel opp? He ran in plain site for decades with token prosecution.

This Observer article from 2019 covers most of it: https://observer.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-spy-intelligenc...

You presumably stopped hearing about it as he was arrested and then died. You can't prosecute a dead man, and there's no closure for the victims.

I'm guessing he had tons of tape on people who didn't like that one bit, hence the "suicide." I was hoping to see something come of that, at the very least a conviction for his sidekick Ghislaine.

Him becoming dead might have something to do with it.

It's a very difficult story to report on because

1) the people who own your institution may be involved on some level,

2) all legitimate sources of novel material information will have been destroyed,

3) interviews are worthless because everybody who we know about who would have anything interesting to say are also both implicated and endangered, and there are so many kooks claiming to know things that it would be impossible to sort them out of the people who we don't know about.

It's bizarre that we even think that this story would have an outcome. A number of the completely arbitrary people we shower laurels on under crony capitalism like to have sex with runaway/endangered teenagers under completely safe and shielded circumstances. They disguised payment by parking money in a fake (investment fund/tax advisory structure/real estate partnership) with a guy who spent his entire life procuring for and protecting them. He probably kept blackmail material that got him out of the first prosecution, and lost control of that blackmail material before the next prosecution.

Clinton's sanctions on Iraq killed a half million children. That's more important than the fact that he may have abused teenagers on a sex plane/island, and he still speaks at the Democratic convention. We know that he manipulated a young intern into sex while on the job, and suspect he may be a serial sex abuser/rapist, and we try to make his wife president. We all know about "pussy-grabbing" Trump.

We need to get over the delusion that sunlight solves problems. Sunlight often makes problems seem commonplace and therefore unimportant. There would be nothing to expect out of a full exposure of Epstein and his network of associates other than a few old men going to jail, and being replaced by people just as bad. It's just something we desire out of prurient interest.

If we're really interested, we create social and political structures that either limit the ability of the wealthy to operate with impunity (a pointless effort IMO, because money is power), or limit the ability to become that wealthy. This is assuming we think that one of the purposes of government is to defend the weak from the strong. Maybe we don't care about that, and abused teens are just another cost to maintain a desirable status quo, like half a million Iraqi children.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8

Reply on news.ycombinator.com