Is Mossad Run by Morons?

By Rich Lowry

Friday, July 18, 2025

 

If there’s anything we’ve learned about Mossad the last couple of years, it is that it is very good at what it does.

 

But some of the same MAGA influencers who fear its influence also seem to think it’s run by morons who sponsored Jeffrey Epstein.

 

“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy,” Tucker Carlson said of Epstein the other day, “had direct connections to a foreign government. No one is allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty.”

 

“As long as we are sending you money,” Carlson continued regarding Israel, shifting into “just asking questions” mode, “if you are committing crimes on our soil, we have an absolute right to know, did you do this or not?”

 

Steve Bannon, covering all his bases, says Epstein was working for Mossad, MI6, Saudi intelligence, and the CIA.

 

Charlie Kirk, taking the moderate position, says only that Epstein may have been working for Mossad, among other possible connections to intelligence services.

 

The first question to ask about this purported relationship is: Why would Mossad want to associate itself with Epstein? He was under investigation for his sexual crimes going back to 2005 and convicted of a few of them (as part of a sweetheart plea deal) in 2008, and would be under federal investigation again about a decade later.

 

Clearly, it would risk an enormous black eye for the State of Israel to connect itself to a known sex offender whose lifestyle was flamboyant and an ongoing crime scene.

 

What would be the supposed upside? Compromising information on the rich and powerful? Presumably there’d be much easier ways to honey-trap men with untoward sexual appetites than hope they become friendly with Jeffrey Epstein and compromise themselves on his private island.

 

We should also assume that, after the Jonathan Pollard debacle, Israel is very cautious about doing anything that would endanger its relationship with the United States. Running Epstein would risk a bigger scandal and implicate Israel in his crimes — again, for no obvious upside. It’s not as though he knew the location of Hassan Nasrallah at any given moment.

 

If the notion of Epstein as Israeli spy seems implausible, if not farcical, it’s gotten some superficial plausibility from parts of the record that have been exaggerated or misinterpreted. (The AGHamilton29 account on X has done great work pushing back against this stuff.)

 

Perhaps most important, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida who worked out the plea deal with Epstein, Alex Acosta, supposedly said that he was told to go easy on Epstein by higher-ups in the Bush administration at the time because Epstein was with intelligence. Acosta allegedly said this as part of his vetting process to become Trump’s first secretary of labor in the first term.

 

But this didn’t come directly from Acosta. In a piece for the Daily Beast in 2019, reporter Vicky Ward said that an unnamed source told her about this exchange:

 

He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition. . . .

 

As the leftist journalist Josh Marshall noted at the time, this sounds more like movie dialogue than real life. Also, Epstein wasn’t allowed to abscond to Tel Aviv — he served time in jail, albeit too briefly and on much too lenient terms.

 

More to the point, Acosta denies he ever said this. Asked about it at a press conference as labor secretary when the Epstein story reemerged, Acosta seemed to deny it, although, admittedly, in a halting and indirect fashion.

 

As part of an extensive 2020 Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report into the handling of the case by Acosta and the Southern District, Acosta told the investigators that he had no information about Epstein being an intelligence asset. Asked specifically about his equivocating answer at the press conference, he stipulated that his answer was meant to be a no. (The OPR report notes that Acosta was made aware that he could go into classified session if he wanted to share information that couldn’t be made public.)

 

The report related that OPR “found no evidence suggesting that Epstein” was an “‘intelligence asset,’ or that anyone—including any of the subjects of OPR’s investigation—believed that to be the case, or that Epstein was afforded any benefit on such a basis.”

 

Vicky Ward herself, by the way, who reported the purported Acosta intelligence quote, has said she doesn’t believe Epstein was a foreign agent.

 

Then, there’s Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s most important associate.

 

It’s true that her father, Robert Maxwell, was an incredibly shady character with genuine connections to intelligence. This is no reason to believe that any Mossad relationship was passed along to Ghislaine, though, or through her, on to Epstein. (Robert Maxwell may have died before Ghislaine met Epstein.)

 

Tucker Carlson adduces that Epstein’s well-documented relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is further evidence that Epstein must have been working with Mossad. But this relationship really cuts the other way. Why would a Mossad asset be known to spend inordinate time with a former high-ranking Israeli official? And if Epstein was with Mossad, why would Bibi Netanyahu, of all people, call on Barak to be investigated for his relationship with him, potentially exposing the whole sordid matter?

 

Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein, maintains that he asked his client if he had contacts with intelligence agencies, and Epstein said no, even though it would have been in his legal interest to disclose any relationships.

 

Regarding Epstein’s death, which many believe was really a murder, the Mossad accusations get more fantastic. Israeli intelligence had to clean up after itself by killing an American citizen on U.S. soil — in fact, while he was held in a U.S. jail? Or, alternatively, they had to rely on the U.S. government, or some other dark shadowy force, to do it for them?

 

Making Epstein go away was so important to Mossad that it put at risk Israel’s relationship with its most important ally to off him?

 

By the way, if Mossad killed Epstein, and was capable of pulling off a no-fingerprints operation in extremely difficult circumstances on U.S. soil, surely they would have killed Ghislaine Maxwell, too, before she went to trial with an incentive to spill her guts. If they could fake an Epstein suicide, why not a Maxwell accident?

 

All of this so beggars belief it’s almost not worth addressing, except that influential voices on the right believe Israel might be behind one of the most hideous scandals in recent American life.