Addendum: A non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein
Around seven months ago I wrote the post “a non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein”. In it, I make the argument that Jeffrey Epstein did actually kill himself and that he was a CIA agent. I reach that conclusion mostly by drawing on some Conspiracy Theory and doing some light research.
I am mostly satisfied with my reasoning, and in particular my conclusion that Epstein was a high level informant for American intelligence services. However, over time I became less satisfied with my conclusion about Epstein’s death. The paradox of the Epstein case is that the circumstances of his death seem so organized, and yet succeeding investigative details and a nuanced understanding of the parties involved seem to completely rule out foul play. It’s quite literally a locked room murder story.
Problems with the murder hypothesis
Impracticality, lack of forensic evidence, lack of witnesses
Multiple reviewers of footage from that night, including the Attorney General at the time, claimed related cameras around Epstein’s cell showed no one exiting or entering the block he was in. I am satisfied in the assumption that not all of the parties who verified this made a mistake or are secretly controlled by some puppet-master behind the scenes. This means Epstein would have to be killed by someone in his housing block who escaped their cell during the night, broke into Epstein’s cell without any witnesses, and then strangled him to death without leaving any obvious and unmistakable evidence of a struggle for the coroner, and this seems totally implausible. Epstein didn’t yell as his neighboring inmate sat there picking the lock? Get blood and skin under his fingernails? Do literally anything while this degenerate ninja-inmate tied his bedsheets around his neck? None of the other inmates thought to mention this if that’s what happened, even after it was clear there was a coverup and they might be able to swing immunity out of it?
Epstein’s will & foreknowledge of his death
Epstein clearly knew when he was going to die, because he drafted and signed a will just two days before he did. You can make up murder stories where he knows this, but Epstein seems like the type of person to cause maximum damage to his killers by explicitly telling others who he believed was going to off him and why.
Lack of viable suspects
I don’t think Epstein’s sex abuse victims have accused anyone with either the motive or means to organize a high-security jailhouse murder, regardless of the particular circumstances. This pretty much leaves the CIA, or some random unknown third party that wanted him dead for something maybe unrelated to raping children.
I say motive because even if everything accused about any single one of the people fingered in the Epstein scandal were proven in a court of law, they still wouldn’t be facing life imprisonment. It’s hard to imagine how someone sane could see killing Epstein as a rational solution to their relatively minor legal problems, without the benefit of hindsight. Why would you risk getting life without parole for assassinating a state’s witness so you could avoid five years in prison after a plea bargain for statuatory rape?
I say means because organizing the murder of potential witnesses is the type of thing that only makes sense if you already have trusted confederates you can task. If you are a major drug dealer, and you have five direct underlings, and one of them goes to jail and it looks like they’re going to testify against you, you can task one of the remaining four people with organizing a hit because you’re already trusting that person in the course of your job and doing so doesn’t mean assuming much additional risk. But if you don’t have those pre-existing relationships then trying to get someone, or a group of people, to cooperate in killing a potential witness is, at best, replacing one potential witness with another potential witness. None of the Known Quantities (aside from hypothetically the CIA I guess) seem to be in possession of existing contacts useful in ameliorating this dilemma.
(Not to mention the fact that if you haven’t already arranged murders before, you might think “damn, maybe I’ll fuck this up and dig myself into an even deeper hole than I already have.”)
And my (admittedly limited) vision into how the CIA is structured and its officers are incentivized says that the people inside the CIA who would have any motive to murder Epstein would not be able to, in practice, use workplace resources to illegally assassinate an American citizen.
If I am very very very wrong and the CIA really has that little internal oversight over the Special Activities Division kill button and our intelligence agencies are that dirty, then the people involved probably have no reason to risk escalating attention by murdering Epstein because in most of these alternate universes they don’t face repercussions for cultivating him as an agent. You probably either live in a world where your intelligence agencies have impunity or a world where they have to organize assassinations of key figures; it makes less sense to me that a CIA would be both capable of assassinating Epstein AND scared of him testifying in court.
No in-progress plea bargain at Epstein’s time of death
If Epstein still had incriminating information on other people he thought he could leverage for a better sentence, he would have been using it, and he would have been completely safe.
This would have been a major part of the story if it had happened. A bunch of people would have known it was happening, including his lawyers, who have failed thus far to mention such a plea or which people, if any, he was set to testify against.
Epstein was a wall street executive with zero sense of criminal loyalty or honor. He would absolutely have been ratting on co-conspirators if he thought it was something he could do to get out of hard time, and would have started negotiating such a plea well before he died instead of sitting in jail crying about his living conditions. He did this exact thing as a pre-emptive strike on a finance partner who helped him steal buckets of money in the 90s, before he was even indicted, just to make sure the other guy didn’t get the opportunity to do it to him first.
Epstein would have faced little to no threat of direct reprisal for such testimony. WITSEC has a literal 100% success rate at protecting informants from the worst criminal organizations in the world. Movies and television shows have lied to you about this, because a 100% success rate WITSEC makes for a very uncompelling story, and is anti-fun and anti-edgy to the point that people resist believing it.
It turns out that criminals, just like everyone else, have a coordination problem in punishing defectors. Even perennial institutions like the American Mafia with specific public reputations to uphold are typically lax about assassinating oathbreakers when they didn’t hurt the specific regime of the people currently in charge. Criminals want informants to die in general, they don’t have the motivation to personally go through the trouble and risk of enforcing underworld justice themselves, unless those people are actively putting guys from their organization in particular in jail. Murdering people is very expensive.
Please read this or another book on WITSEC before you start to quibble with me about the 100% success rate. Yes, there have been, in extremely rare circumstances, people who viciously assault civilians or start to move large amounts of drugs again after getting into the program, and then get kicked out of WITSEC after that as per their agreement, and then go back to their old neighborhoods against the advice of sane people and get hurt. If you want to use this to say Epstein would have been in danger, then go ahead and select a specific actual reference example of this happening so that we can debate whether or not that “exception” was the result of covert actions taken by people outside the program who wanted them dead, or that Epstein would have been forced to make the same mistakes. I say “100% success rate” because WITSEC has been 100% successful at doing the thing Epstein would need it to do, and the thing a reasonable person would want it to do, not because it’s able to magically sedate every pathologically criminal psychopath with a death wish.
Low likelihood of FBI Corruption
Finally, as people pointed out in the comments of the post, I do in fact have a strong prior that the parties that investigated Epstein’s death, namely the FBI, are and were generally habitually honest in the relevant sense. Explaining the whole story behind why I believe this, even in spite of the circumstances, would take several posts to convey sufficiently for those that don’t want to hear it, but the cliff-notes are:
There have been exceptionally few apparent cases of corrupt FBI officers in the last fifty years. And if it were possible to corrupt the FBI and had happened, I do in fact expect there would be more apparent cases. Substantiating that second sentence is one of the things that would take a lot of prep work.
Those corrupt agents, predictably, had a limited ability to actually tamper with evidence. Tampering with evidence is really dangerous! They were instead suspected of giving information to criminals about things like potential informants or arrests, which is easy enough to do in private if the person you’re giving information to is your CI.
In the two to four serious possible cases of organized crime or individual criminals corrupting FBI agents I’m aware of, it was contained to specific agents. There was not a culture of dishonesty among a task force that might indicate a broader problem, and the rest of the people on the corrupt agents’ team were generally diligent in raising advance concerns.
I have reasons to believe that the “teammates noticing and raising the alarm” part is not a selection effect and is in fact unusual for cases of corruption in law enforcement. Contrast this with the typical case of corruption in American local law enforcement where bad behavior often turns out to be endemic or systematically overlooked by the rest of the department.
A reviewer remarks that the reaction to this evidence could be “Look at other law enforcement bodies! They’re so often corrupt—why not just believe the FBI has the resources to hide it really well?” My point is that the examples we have of FBI corruption seem systematically dissimilar to the examples we have of widespread corruption in other departments, in a way that implies they are edge cases. It’s true that specific instances of local police departments being systematically, criminally corrupt ought to increase your prior that the FBI is compromised too. If those instances seemed so emblematic I were starting with a prior of near certainty, I might start to reason that the FBI were just extraordinarily good at coverups. But I don’t actually think such a prior is justified, and while the FBI does have, say, a larger budget than local departments, those resources are earmarked for law enforcement and are not obviously useful for covering up their own corrupt behavior.
FBI agents basically lack extrinsic motivation to become de novo corrupt, mostly by design.
FBI agents are already paid fairly well, in status as well as money. They make solidly above median income and get a position inside America’s most elite crime fighting agency, and these positions are competed for and treasured very intensely even if you personally wouldn’t value one. A substantial proportion of women find physically fit elite lawmen attractive. They have sex.
The benefits of accepting bribes in a first world country, as a police officer or a district attorney, are really quite small. While I respect that others may have different utility functions, it seems to me like only extraordinarily stupid or self-destructive people inside American law enforcement do it, regardless of morals. Even a 5% risk of ruining your career and going to jail for five years is probably not worth tolerating for monthly payments you cannot actually use to buy a house. And an agent accepting money from a typical professional or habitual criminal stands much more than a 5% chance of getting caught.
One way you can tell bribes are not much of a motivator is the fact that some of the most cited cases of possible FBI corruption did not even involve bribes! If you believe Lindley Devecchio did aid Greg Scarpa, he apparently did it mostly because it made him feel cool, or because he thought Scarpa’s continued ability to work for him as an informant might help him boost prestige among coworkers.
The FBI’s recruitment process is very good at filtering out people likeliest to disregard their incentives and become de novo corrupt anyways for reasons like pathological risk-taking. This is a primary goal of their screening and they go over and beyond by filtering out many who you would probably say are fine but seem even slightly on paper like they’d be interested in taking such risks.
Corruption is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also a self-refuting prophecy, and the prevalence of such corruption scales with common knowledge. The FBI has a general reputation among organized crime of being highly resistant to blackmail and bribes. So gangs and vice networks tend to stick to turning local law enforcement when they decide that’s advantageous, and so the FBI becomes seen as even less corrupt, in a virtuous cycle. This phenomenon is part of why there’s a gulf between countries that have ubiquitous corruption by patrolmen/traffic cops and countries where very few people pay any bribes on a regular basis.
The FBI is a huge organization. The cases where FBI agents have been corrupted were cases where there was a specific team investigating particular groups of people, like “Boston area crime bosses”, for long periods of time, who could actually influence the progress of those investigations long term. Why would the mysterious third party’s random mole, if they had one, be particularly likely to be assigned to the investigation of Epstein’s death? Or even be in a position to get themselves assigned to that investigation if that were possible?
Problems with the naive suicide hypothesis
The death rates inside these prisons is extremely low. How come the first person in this prison that managed to kill themselves in this prison in so many years happened to be as high profile as Epstein? Lots of people in that jail want to die.
How on earth do these cameras specifically along his cell go out at the same time as Epstein is hanging himself? Even if this happens all the time it’s gotta be a hundred, maybe a thousand to one that it happens for those specific cameras on that day.
How come the guards violated protocol that night by not checking on Epstein every thirty minutes, and falsified records to say they did? If your hypothesis is that the guards were lazy or that this prison’s security was lax, why does that hypothesis happen to be the case in this particular prison? Also, why does this particular prison seem to be so otherwise successful at preventing suicides of people in similar situations as Epstein?
The third option
So my opinions of both hypotheses were fairly low. I settled this by saying that the murder hypothesis is stupider than the naive suicide hypothesis, and went the latter. The justification in my head was something like: “The fact that this case was brought to my attention meant that it was a low-probability event anyways, and so it’s not really that odd that it’s so strange.”
I think that was a mistake, possibly a generalizable mistake to learn from. Instead of saying “I am really not sure what happened, but X is more likely than Y”, I picked one and forgot or didn’t realize there could be alternative explanations. If both of your theories seem like million-to-one events, they’re probably both wrong and you’re making a mistake in concluding they’re the only available options. I have now come up with a third hypothesis, which I guess you could say is technically covered by #2:
Epstein paid correctional officers to let him die. The cameras weren’t working and/or the guards failed to check on him that night, because Epstein explicitly bribed someone(s) to disable those cameras and/or look the other way. The base rate of suicide in the MCC correctional facility is low because generally its precautions work to prevent suicide attempts.
Epstein took deliberate action to ensure they didn’t. He did so partly to save himself a life in prison, but also as part of a plan to spite his victims. His suicide denied them both the satisfaction of a trial and complicated access to any resources which his will would pour into an inaccessible private trust. That will, by the way, seemed deliberately designed to most observers to minimize the government’s ability to access his fortune or get him to pay restitution in the event of his death.
I know this seems like the kind of wild theory you say you believe in an essay because it’s thought provoking. This is what I actually believe; it’s my 85% hypothesis. It’s the only story that makes sense; it explains Epstein’s behavior, the incidentally poor security, why there was nobody going in or out of the housing blocks and no evidence of a struggle, and doesn’t propose some wide ranging conspiracy across multiple government departments that we would already probably know about. It’s the only way he could be expected to kill himself inside that prison in the first place if he did. It also explains why this plot wasn’t uncovered: because there are like, three people that would have to know about it, not even including Epstein’s lawyers. Epstein could have just made up a sob-story and convinced a correctional officer to look the other way himself, or promised the officer his lawyers would pay them after the fact, and then didn’t, because arranging that would be more complicated and time consuming.
And I’ll admit, even to the hit of my own credibility, that I love this theory because it’s so… Anticlimactic? Left-field? No one wants to believe this story, except pedantic weirdos like me. It’s so satisfyingly unsatisfying. You don’t figure this out by imbuing some grand intentionality to the story or thematic significance to the people involved. You get it by following all the billiard balls really closely and paying attention to all of the uninteresting details and seeing what incidental property emerges. And once you’re done you’re usually left without some obvious message because these people aren’t living their lives deliberately trying to convey some grand story about corruption. Those lessons are there, but they’re not there as part of a curriculum designed to teach them to you.
That was also how Goering killed himself just before he was due to be hanged. He cultivated good relations with his guards, and bribed one to return his cyanide capsule that had been confiscated at his arrest.
I’ve really enjoyed this and the previous post, not because I give a shit about what happened to Epstein, but because you’re walking us through your reasoning process step by step and I love to see that. Good posts for LW!
Bravo. This does indeed seem like a plausible story that explains all the suspicious parts.
Really enjoyed this post, and think this is the most plausible hypothesis I’ve heard so far. Wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out to be something else of course, but I think this is a really solid best guess given the limited data we have available.
The FBI may not have much of a record of outside corruption, but it has a long track record of corruption by the government, mainly coverups of anything and everything, but also corruption by the CIA.
Did they go out recently? Has anyone claimed that they were working the week before? A simple hypothesis is that only half of the cameras in the building work at any given time. This hypothesis is easy to check: just go through all the cameras. Has the FBI done that? Do they want to know? Do they want us to know? It would be harder to determine if the guards never check prisoners and always falsify records, but it might be possible to check by reviewing camera footage.
The “last 50 years” qualifier is important. I basically separate the FBI into two eras: The pre- and post-Hoover era. J. Edgar Hoover was definitely compromised, including, in my and many others opinions, externally by the mafia.
I don’t see how this is any way relevant to my comment. I didn’t say anything about the mafia 50 years ago. I seems to me like it exists for purely formal reasons, to produce the deceit that you have responded to my comment.
But let me word my comment differently: the FBI is never corrupted. The problem is that its purpose is to control and destroy information. It is at war with humanity, including the American public. You can see this just by looking at its behavior in this case.
It’s relevant to your comment because the severe “internal” abuses of power you’re referring to happened during J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-year stint as a political supervillain. If you have later examples I haven’t heard of them.
Very edgy, but my opinion remains that life for me and many other people I know would be a lot harder without some form of federal law enforcement, even if it were abusive.
Saying that Hoover was externally compromised would be a ridiculous response to someone saying that he was internally compromised. But I wasn’t talking about Hoover, because I bothered to read you before responding.
I’m confused on what exactly we’re talking about anymore. The point about external compromise was just something I tagged on in response to
The original point I was attempting to convey was that the
occured under Hoover and I’m generally unaware of any large scale abuses of power by the FBI after his death. If you have some counterexamples or countersuspicions I am genuinely interested in hearing about them.
I guess this is the new “Oswald acted alone”: Epstein killed himself, he wasn’t encouraged or physically assisted by anyone else, and it was him, not any of his powerful frenemies, who arranged to have his cellmate (now dead) removed for the night, the guards violate procedure and then lie about it, and the video cameras turned off.
Seriously, look at the chain of command. He was in a US federal prison. US federal prisons are run by a branch of the Department of Justice. The head of the Department of Justice was William Barr, whose father was a retired OSS agent who gave Epstein his first job. Barr was sworn in early in 2019, just five months later Epstein was finally incarcerated awaiting trial, and another month later he was dead. He had long since moved from asset to liability, and his real bosses finally retired him—that’s my theory.
By this logic anybody important who dies in prison is murdered, because there’s always going to be some seven degrees to Kevin Bacon connection between powerful people and someone in the US federal government nominally in charge of either the prison or the DoJ. This is something we can predict, in advance, without learning anything else about the case except the parties involved. And also according to this logic we should assume this connection means murder even if, in practice, the gears say they can’t effectively unilaterally affect the investigation.
But hey, there’s always the 10% ¯\(ツ)/¯
Shall we talk further about Barr? His father was OSS, and thereby was plausibly the man who ushered Epstein into the covert world. Barr’s own first job was for seven years at the CIA, it’s where he first got into law and politics. As Attorney-General for Bush 41, he’s said to have impeded investigation of BCCI, and he definitely made the case for pardoning several Iran-Contra figures. After the cold war, he settled into civilian life in the telecom and media sectors for several decades, until Trump brought him back.
The whole first stage of Barr’s career coincided with the establishment of a new system of political oversight of CIA activities, and then the growth of an alternative, informal, unsupervised network whose epitome was Iran-Contra. (Today’s generation might think of it all as similar to the post-Snowden turmoil surrounding NSA, though many details are very different.)
My point is that Barr has inside experience, managing the legal fallout of extralegal covert activities with discretion. Of course, it’s a long way from getting rogue operators a presidential pardon, to having the ultimate rogue operator die in jail before he can make it to court, but those long years were precisely the period of time during which Epstein’s operation ballooned out of control. Perhaps it required the chaos of the Trump years, and the work of old hands like Barr, to finally bring him down.
Sorry, this post ignores too many obviously relevant factors to be very convincing.
It makes arguments based on how it would not make sense for someone to take the risk to eliminate Epstein because they would go to jail for murder IF CAUGHT, but the fundamental thing going on with Epstein is people, even well-connected billionaires, are fully willing to do things that will send to prison IF CAUGHT because they believe (for good reason) that they will not be caught, and if caught will not be punished to the full extent of the law. So you’re already dealing with a set of people who are willing to risk going to jail to get what they want, and willing to pay other people to take on that risk to help them.
There’s also no mention of Trump or Clinton, two people that Epstein might obviously be tempted to implicate who have both direct and indirect power over the CIA and other US government agencies and who we know have few to no moral qualms about having people killed. These are also the exact people who would be in position to subvert the Attorney General or anyone else looking at the evidence.
If Epstein still has enough access to money to bribe people to let him kill himself, he has enough money to bribe people to let him live a life of luxury in jail, or to fully stage an escape, perhaps by bribing them to let him stay in a minimum security prison, where there are frequent escapes (https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-prisons-prison-breaks-business-c1979d6ad6e7b3531968dab0e61eb22d)
The last time he was arrested, he subverted a ton of people to the extent that he got a relatively low level of punishment that let him spend 12 hours a day doing whatever he wanted outside of prison, zero consequences for breaking the rules (eg flying to other cities when he was supposed to stay in florida on his “work release”), and even with that he still get let out early.
In addition, the fundamental premise of the Epstein story is that dozens if not hundreds of wealthy and well-connected people have in fact been “subverted” for years into covering up or at least not making a fuss about frequent underaged sex and rape.
You can credibly claim that Epstein currently had no plans of talking, but like you said he had turned against a past co-conspirator, so you can’t credibly claim that no one who was at risk if he talked might not believe that it was a better deal to eliminate him than to worry for the next 20 years.
And that they would be caught
They would not have relevant control over the people who investigated Epstein’s death or an ability tot amper with he evidence I have presented or the ability to command risk-free any parties that might be able to murder Epstein.
This is not how prisons work.
Also not how prisons or prison assingment works.
Being able to bribe someone is not about having “enough money” to do it. It has to be feasible as a financial transaction. You can have a billion dollars to bribe the president with and if I can’t get it to him or propose a bribery to him without being charged with bribery and the government forcing the money to be destroyed then it doesn’t work.
Read the original post! Fully explained by my hypothesis that he was a CIA agent.
Are you actually, explicitly saying that hundreds of wealthy and well-connected people have been subverted into covering up underaged sex and rape, and not just referencing a story that they were? Why? Who? Why haven’t they been implicated by Epstein’s many victims?
Yeah, the version I liked was that someone else bribed a guard/guards into letting him kill himself but that’s basically the same.
You discuss “compromised agents” of the FBI as if they’re going to be lone, investigator-level agents. If there was going to be any FBI/CIA/whatever cover-up, the version of that which I would expect, is that Epstein would’ve had incriminating information on senior FBI/CIA personnel, or politicians. Incriminating information could just be that the FBI/CIA knew that Epstein was raping underage girls for 20 years, and didn’t stop him, or even protected him. In all your explanations of how impossible a crime Epstein’s murder would be to pull off, a thing that makes it seem more plausible to me is if the initial conspirator isn’t just someone trying to wave money around, but is someone with authority.
Go ahead and mock, but this is what I thought the default assumption was whenever someone said “Epstein didn’t kill himself” or “John McAfee didn’t kill himself”. I never assumed it would just be one or two lone, corrupt agents.
I don’t see if this is addressed, but the way mutual kompramat works is that both parties are strongly incentivized to neutralize the other’s kompramat on them, and only then move in for the kill. The random timing of his arrest in the conspiracy scenario is that it’s when they happened to neutralize his dead man’s switch.
The timing of his rearrest on the 2008 charges wasn’t particularly random if you followed the case. If it involved the sudden reappearance of new evidence or something like that I’d probably have said otherwise.
If we agree that Epstein killed himself, who convinced him to do it, and how?
By analogy with suicide bombers, Kamikazes, hijackers, depressed folks, depressed folks on risky drugs, bullied depressed folks, it seems like there is a continuum distribution of responsibility from self to others.
A trivial conclusion is that the criminal justice system edged him toward suicide, but a variety of covert threats and/or loyalties could also have been in play.
lc, I want to add some additional nuance to the events surrounding the dates of Epstein’s death, August 10th 2019. Given how involved he was in the shadow banking arm of Lehman there’s been some speculation on his role in the ’08 crisis—the first warning shot happened to be August 9-10th, 2007. I do not believe his deathdate is insignificant—if this was part of a plan to spite his victims, as you say, those could be financial, too, no? In planned suicides dates are extraordinarily important.
One other bit of data that I find curious—it was but a day after this court case motioned for discovery from the US Treasury that Epstein had his will drawn up.