But it is also inconvenient to the emerging media narrative that Epstein was a Kremlin spy or otherwise an intelligence asset for the Russian government and nothing else. Simply put, there is no Russian equivalent in Epstein’s life to Ehud Barak, a former prime minister and defense minister of Israel who these disclosures show was meeting with and taking advice from the pedophile while he was serving in the Israeli government, and whose friendship with him dramatically deepened in the years that followed. Epstein is now widely acknowledged, even by one of his own friends and a current Trump official, as having used blackmail against powerful people — or, in the words of the New York Times, “keeping notes on some of his contacts” and “revel[ing] in claiming to know his friends’ secrets” and how they “might empower him.” Yet the fact that this might have involved one of Israel’s most prominent political figures continues to be strangely unspeakable in mainstream political discourse.

Whoops 🤭