The Epstein Mossad story comes down to one source

David Reaboi joins me now. He’s the author of the new book, The Epstein Conspiracy: How Russia Turned a Lie About Jeffrey Epstein into a Weapon Against America, Israel, and the Jews. David, it’s great to have you. So the whole idea that Epstein was working for Mossad comes down to just one source. After years of investigations and millions of pages of leaked documents, and zero evidence, mind you, why, David? Why are there still people who think Israeli intel played a role in helping Epstein pull this off?

Well, it’s because it’s the fruit of what I believe to be a tremendously successful Russian information operation. It was seeded and pushed around through source laundering, through the media. And basically, what I found in doing this research was that it all comes down to the testimony of one serial fraudster who has been on the scene for 40 years. He pops up in and out. His name is Ari Ben-Menashe. He was Israeli, but was never in Mossad. He kind of claims that he was in Mossad, but he was in Israeli military intelligence. He was kicked out in the 1980s. And since then, his professional shtick has been to pop up and accuse people, usually recently dead, of being in the Mossad. In addition to that, he is a kind of liar for hire for Russia-linked warlords throughout Africa and the rest of the world.

I mean, so why would this person, and Russia, want to do this, to invoke the idea that Israel helped Epstein, I guess, have some safety, a safeguard, a safety net, or help him pull something like this off, this 20-year charade? I mean, what would be the point of that?

Well, from the Russian point of view, it’s very advantageous. Obviously, if you’re running an information operation, if you want to create chaos, if you want people to believe things, it’s a pretty good, easy bet to pick the most viral, grabby story in the world, which at the time was Jeffrey Epstein. And there was all sorts of media around him. It was literally the biggest story in the world. And after he died, they took the opportunity to point Epstein towards Israel and to sort of use that as an information warfare weapon, really not even against Israel, but against the United States.

Because longstanding Russian doctrine on information warfare, which I have in the book, and I found chapter and verse, I actually included in an appendix a long section about Russian political warfare and information warfare, leans on conspiracy theories, and antisemitic conspiracy theories in particular. So the Russians have long understood. They understood it back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Tsars kind of made up as an antisemitic information warfare weapon more than 100 years ago. They’ve been doing it really since then, and this is their latest play.

So what they understand is that antisemitism is kind of unique in that it destroys open societies. And, frankly, in closed societies, too. It breaks people’s brains. It makes them suspicious of everyone. It makes them despise their own country. And once you start this, and once you kind of start the hunt against Jews and the suspicion that Jews are secretly controlling the country, then all the rest of your politics kind of falls away.

It’s total brain rot. There’s no more… I mean, it’s rotting the minds of people that I once thought were civil people, people who had applied logic to their points of view and their thoughts and their rationale. And the second you say something like that, it’s a pretty stark statement, and you can’t substantiate it, and you run with it, and then you keep saying it for however many years. I mean, it’s totally warped so many minds. Do you think, David, the people reading your book, do you think it’s going to quell any of that poison, the people that hold that to be the truth?

Well, unfortunately not. It’s very funny, because the book came out on Monday morning, and before 8 a.m. on Monday morning, I was deluged on Twitter with thousands of angry commenters. And it’s like, “you know what? I don’t think thousands of people are waking up at 6 a.m. targeting me on the first day of launch. I don’t think that’s legitimate.” I think it’s just a bunch of bots in Moscow, or maybe in Karachi or something. But yeah, look, people’s brains have been broken, sadly, and a lot of people just won’t let this go. And I’ve been kind of arguing with people online, and I say, “well, I’ve actually looked into this. Have you read the book? Have you even looked into this?” And they just take it as an article of faith.

I know. It’s like one podcaster, or podcast, we call it a bunch of them, but one person says it, the other gets the idea of it. They’re like, “oh, that could maybe make sense.” Again, no evidence included, per usual.

One of the problems here, too, when we say that it breaks brains: it literally does. We have people who replied to some of my tweets saying, “here is Jeffrey Epstein wearing an IDF t-shirt. That means he was in Mossad.” And I’m scratching my head, and I’m like, “how do you guys tie your shoes in the morning?”

That leap. Yeah. This type of credulity, I mean, you can’t live your life this way, with this kind of standard of evidence. But here we are. And more and more people are going down this road, more and more people are thinking like this. And I kind of weep for the country, because anybody can pop up and say anything, and there’s just no more common sense. Unfortunately. David, what do you want people to really take away from your book? And how long did it take you to write this?

So I began writing it, I guess, early this year. And I started doing research and I was digging it up. And honestly, I began this journey thinking that this was just your run-of-the-mill internet conspiracy theory. And then when I found that it was actually the same guy, Ari Ben-Menashe, who ran literally the same play, word for word, with Epstein that he did 30 years earlier with Robert Maxwell, that’s when it started to get really interesting. And I was starting to write this, and I’m writing about conspiracy theories, so I’m like, “you know what, I need to actually dot every i and cross every t,” because the last thing I want to do is sound like a conspiracy theorist.

So I went back and I said, “you know what, I’m going to use the standard that the U.S. government used to use”: the Active Measures Working Group, which during the 1980s was tasked with tracing and responding to Soviet active measures, Soviet information warfare. And I said, “OK, how did they do it? How did they figure out who they can attribute this stuff to?” Because it’s not like we’re going to find a piece of paper or an email or something saying, “yes, we did it.” So you have to sort of reconstruct it and figure out the attribution of who’s behind it in a kind of different way, but also in a disciplined way. So I wanted to make sure that I could never be confused or attacked for sounding like conspiracy land.

You spent a lot of time doing the research, and you’re going to make sure that nobody’s going to get you on missing any mark. And so that’s why good things take time. And you got a book out on it, and it’s more in depth than it could be in a simple exposé. So congrats, David. David Reaboi, everyone, author of the book The Epstein Conspiracy: How Russia Turned a Lie About Jeffrey Epstein into a Weapon Against America, Israel, and the Jews. Thanks so much.

Appreciate it.