By now, the Epstein files are (almost) old news. More than three million pages of documents relating to the sex-offender have been released by the Department of Justice. The fallout has been cataclysmic, as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Lord Mandelson know only too well.
But have you heard of the Epstein tapes? Buried within the millions of files released by the DoJ are thousands of videos. And within those are dozens of MP4 audio files. Many are not easily found through the standard DoJ search engine but have helpfully been collated by volunteers at a website called Jefftube.
The tapes appear to include private conversations between Epstein and his friends. And separately, recorded calls between potential victims, witnesses and investigators, some stretching back to before the financier’s first imprisonment in 2009. So far at least, far less scrutiny has been applied to these audio tapes.
I’ve just started going through the material but already some of it raises interesting questions. The most pertinent is whether Epstein secretly recorded conversations for his own use later on. This would tie into a wider theory about Epstein that he collected information on people – recordings, pictures, videos – which he knew could be used against them. This week, The Telegraph revealed that he paid private detectives to hide computers and photographs in secret storage lockers across the US.
Some of the recordings released by the DoJ seem to fall into this category.
Take a three hour meeting recorded between Epstein and two people who appear to be Larry Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, and Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel. (I can be pretty certain of the men’s identities. They call each other “Ehud” and “Larry” and make comments that only someone in their position would make. Both men have been contacted for comment).
The meeting appears to have taken place in February 2013, at Epstein’s New York townhouse. Barak was preparing to leave the Israeli government and was asking Epstein’s advice on how to make money. It’s clear that Barak thought he could speak freely – and might have expected the conversation to stay private.
“I have a very good relationship….with Putin,” Barak says. “We sat down with him in his palace, played billiards. I’m talking to him very frankly. He loves to sit with me and talk.” Epstein responds in his nasally Long Island drawl: “I would send a note to Putin saying I’m going to leave the government on March 14. I’m going to be in Scandinavia or Northern Europe. We should have dinner. That’s it. No more. It has to be very short.”
The men discuss everything from Tony Blair’s work for Kazakhstan (Epstein: “I hear gigantic money is given to Tony”) to how Barak could take a board seat at Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company. “Peter’s going to come here next week,” Epstein says. “Andreessen Horowitz, they pay Larry [Summers] a million dollars a year.”
Summers, who doesn’t appear in the last half of the conversation, tells Barak that once he had left government “it was fairly easy to make substantial amounts of money. Not like Jeffrey and some of his friends. But a lot.” And Epstein suggests Barak focus on “low hanging fruit like Kazakhstan. There’s $80 billion in sovereign wealth. They want to be part of the Western world. They want to know there’s discretion.”
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Taken in isolation, the conversation is a fascinating insight into how Epstein’s world worked in practice. If you want to listen to the whole thing, the link is here. But perhaps its importance lies in its very existence. Why did Epstein record the meeting? How many similar recordings are there? And what could they say about some of the key figures in the controversy, such as the former Prince Andrew - who, not incidentally, sold one of his homes to a Kazakh oligarch for millions over asking?
Photograph courtesy U.S. Department of Justice via AP