Are we team Tucker or team Fuentes on this board?

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You can keep saying this until you’re blue in the face but that doesn’t make it true.

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Ward published a story in The Daily Beast about Epstein three days after his July 6, 2019, arrest, in which she relayed a second- or even third-hand account from “a former senior White House official.” According to that unnamed former senior White House official, the federal prosecutor who handled Epstein’s case more than a decade before didn’t prosecute because he was told that the defendant “belonged to intelligence.” This is the first documented account alleging Epstein was a spy. And there’s no sign Ward tried to confirm it with other sources. Recently, she told Wolff she doesn’t really think Epstein was in intelligence. Wolff, it’s worth noting, relied heavily on Bannon’s views on Trump for his first anti-Trump screed, Fire and Fury.

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The federal prosecutor in the first Epstein case was Alexander Acosta, who was serving as Trump’s labor secretary when Epstein was arrested again in 2019. He eventually resigned because of the heat he was taking for letting Epstein off the hook in 2008, but who knows if he might’ve saved his cabinet post had he just doubled down on Ward’s story: Yeah, I had to let the pedo walk because the guys at Langley told me Epstein was their guy. It was peak Russiagate, and he might have won plaudits from MAGA for throwing shade at the Deep State.

Instead, Acosta did what he legally could to dispel Ward’s account. In a press conference a day after her story posted, he said, “I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact.” He explained he couldn’t “address it directly” because of DOJ guidelines limiting public comment on pending cases. But, he added, the reporting on Epstein is “just going down rabbit holes.”

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The Mossad angle is even more absurd. It’s hard to know exactly where the idea that he worked for Israeli intelligence first came from, but any conspiracy theory that involves a Jew—and nearly every conspiracy theory worthy of the name involves Jews—is at some point going to have to incorporate a secret Jewish network. Carlson’s obsession merits at least attribution of ownership if not authorship of the Epstein-Mossad narrative, with guest after guest—Glenn Greenwald, Darryl Cooper, Ana Kasparian, etc.—invited to elaborate on Epstein’s putative work for the Mossad.

Here’s the problem with the Mossad theory. For any foreign intelligence service to run an operation of that scope and for that period of time—two decades at least—it would have to avoid the attention of the FBI, which is the U.S. agency responsible for domestic counterintelligence, like catching foreign spies targeting Americans at home. And there’s no evidence the FBI has ever turned a blind eye to Israeli operations in the United States, never mind protected one. For instance, in 1985, the FBI arrested Jonathan Pollard, who was passing classified U.S. intelligence about Arab states to Israel. He served a 30-year sentence and moved to Israel in 2020 after his additional five-year parole expired.

Indeed, far from protecting Mossad agents on its home turf, the FBI is so determined to out Israeli spies that it invents them when there are none. In 2005, the FBI set up a sting operation and charged two American Israel Public Affairs Committee officials for sharing classified information with Israel. Only this time, there was no evidence that the information the men passed to Israeli, as well as American, officials was classified or even real. The DOJ dropped the charges in 2009.

Greenwald told Carlson during their recent chat about Epstein that U.S. spy services regard the Israelis as a major counterintelligence threat. So, then, what are the chances that a decades-long Mossad operation staged in a mansion in the middle of midtown Manhattan that drew in some of the world’s most famous men—some with private security, some even with secret service details—could have escaped the attention of the FBI? Slim. And with Bill Clinton’s reputation at stake, zero.

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