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When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested (by Trump-appointee and former Rudy Giuliani law partner Geoffrey Berman) on 8 July 2019, the billionaire pedophile became perhaps the highest profile prisoner ever placed under the care of Trump Attorney General Bill Barr.
Epstein was known to have dirt on an “astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people,” with the photos to prove it.
It was widely assumed that many of those rich, famous and powerful people—including then-President Donald Trump—wanted him dead.
In announcing Epstein’s arrest, Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, described behavior that “shocks the conscience”:
Epstein is alleged to have abused dozens of victims… all underage girls… initially recruited to provide Epstein with massages… these massages became increasingly sexual in nature and would typically include one or more sex acts… Epstein also paid certain victims to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused. This allowed Epstein to create an ever expanding web of new victims.
This conduct, as alleged, went on for years and it involved dozens of young girls, some as young as 14 years old… (and) particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
As the New York Times reported following his arrest:
A trove of lewd photographs of girls, discovered in a safe inside the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion the same day he was arrested, is deepening questions about why federal prosecutors in Miami had cut a deal that shielded him from federal prosecution in 2008.
Some have alleged that Jeffrey Epstein and his partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell (daughter of alleged “Israeli superspy” Robert Maxwell) were Mossad spies running a “honey trap” operation in order to blackmail politicians around the world.
But whether or not Epstein was a spy, the raid on his New York City home likely alarmed many of the rich and famous men who had attended parties at Epstein’s mansion.
Case in point: Back in 2000, a porter who worked next door to the Epstein mansion told a British newspaper, “I often see Donald Trump and there are loads of models coming and going, mostly at night. It’s amazing.”
While much of the media attention about the girl-obsessed Trump-Epstein friendship has focused on their “partying” in Florida, it was at Epstein’s NY home that Trump was alleged to have raped then-13-year-old “Katie Johnson,” a case that received renewed attention when it was discussed in Ronan Farrow’s 2019 book, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.”
Epstein should have been protected like the Crown Jewels
Some things you’d think the U.S. government would be able to see coming and make a plan to stop from happening. The 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was one such example. In a similar vein, the risk that Jeffrey Epstein would come to some kind of physical harm in prison was blazingly obvious from the moment he was arrested.
Yet it happened anyway. Twice.
The first time was on 24 July 2019, when Epstein was found injured in his cell. He was placed on suicide watch and was subject to daily psychiatric evaluations.
According to the Daily Mail, “Epstein told prison guards and fellow inmates that he believed someone had tried to kill him.”
What actually happened we will never know because the video from the night of Epstein’s first “suicide attempt” was wiped because of “technical errors.”
Even if he hadn’t been guarded like the Crown Jewels from Day One, it by now should have been apparent to Geoffrey Berman and Bill Barr (and anyone else with a brain) that, if his victims were ever to get the justice that prosecutors said they deserved, Epstein needed to be wrapped in cotton wool, monitored 24/7 and kept away from any of the items most commonly used in real-or-fake prison suicides, such as bed sheets.
Yet Epstein was taken off suicide watch after just six days.
Twelve days after being taken off suicide watch, on 10 August 2019, according to the official report, the recently suicidal Jeffrey Epstein, world’s highest profile inmate, wanted dead by many, was given a bed sheet and left alone for three hours.
(Note: Making prison cells suicide resistant is not at all difficult.)
Barr was shocked, shocked to find Epstein dead in his cell
Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr vowed to “get to the bottom of what happened.” But whaddya know? When they checked the video, some of the most crucial footage from the night Epstein died was found to be “unusable.”
The story doesn’t end there, though.
Two days after Epstein got Epsteined, Bill Barr vowed that “co-conspirators should not rest easy.” In a raid on Epstein’s home on his private island in the Virgin Islands, NBC News reported: “FBI agents seized… at least two computer desktops and an Apple computer.”
“The victims deserve justice and they will get it,” said Barr.
Barr, of course, resigned from the Trump Administration in December 2020, without any of Epstein’s victims getting the justice they deserve. The incriminating evidence seized in New York City and the Virgin Islands remains unseen. Epstein’s co-conspirators continue to sleep as comfortably as they possibly can on their My Pillows at Mar-a-Lago, the Royal Lodge at Windsor, and other fancy locales.
Was Epstein’s death just one more Bill Barr cover-up?
As more and more evidence about the lawlessness of the Trump Administration—and the abuses of power at Trump’s DOJ—continues to emerge, it seems reasonable to ask if Bill Barr told America the truth about the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
After all, we already know Bill Barr is willing to lie whenever the opportunity arises.
Barr also had a family connection to Jeffrey Epstein that dated back almost five decades, through his late father Donald Barr, the former headmaster at New York City’s co-ed Dalton School.
As Greg Olear wrote here on Substack last year, Donald Barr was “kind of a prick, with a bad reputation.” In addition to being nicknamed “Chester the Molester” by his pupils, Donald Barr also wrote kinky sci-fi novels in which “a Donald Barr-like hero was ‘forced’ to have sex with minor girls for the purpose of sadism and procreation.”
Perhaps the handsy headmaster Donald Barr was Jeffrey Epstein’s first blackmail victim, or perhaps the two men just shared a common interest in sex with minors. But whatever the reason, Bill Barr’s dad hired Jeffrey Epstein, “a 21-year-old college dropout with no relevant work experience… to teach mathematics” at Dalton, an elite co-ed prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The job gave Jeffrey Epstein his first adult opportunity to prey on young girls. (It also brought him to the attention of Bear Stearns CEO Alan Greenberg, whose son and daughter went to the school. Greenberg gave the college dropout a job at the investment bank in 1976 after Epstein was fired by Dalton for performance issues.)
I don’t know if Epstein was a spy.
I don’t know who he blackmailed along the way.
I don’t know if he had dirt on Donald Barr or Donald Trump.
But as we learn more about the ways Trump’s DOJ, under Bill Barr’s leadership, became a “secret police” force willing to go to extreme lengths to protect the criminal Trump from political harm, it seems only fair to ask the question: Did Jeffrey Epstein really kill himself?
Further reading: The Epstein Questions Barr Left Hanging: Seven crucial things about the Jeffrey Epstein autopsy that Bill Barr ignored.
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