The Epstein leaks have reopened a door many in Washington hoped would remain sealed. Not the door of gossip – though the media is content to drown the public in that – but the door that leads into the machinery of American power.
These leaks do not merely reveal the fall of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They expose an unholy triangle of money, politics and sex, whose central thread leads to a foreign influence network that has learned to govern the world’s most powerful nation through seduction, dependence and capture.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is not an antisemitic delusion. It is what the documents show, and what Washington’s behaviour confirms. And it is what the Epstein files illuminate with violent clarity.
They show, firstly, that Epstein was never simply a brilliant fraud who climbed from obscure maths teacher to wealthy elite. He was a facade – the social face of an intelligence apparatus designed to corrupt, compromise and control.
His network was not accidental. His closest confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, long reported to have worked closely with Israeli intelligence. His investments flowed into ventures led by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister who visited him repeatedly, even after Epstein’s conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. Barak headed Carbyne, an Israeli security tech firm in which Epstein quietly placed funds.
Investigations by Drop Site make the picture even clearer. Epstein was not just socially adjacent to Israeli intelligence; he was operationally useful. The outlet’s reporting shows that his Manhattan home hosted senior Israeli intelligence officer Yoni Koren for extended stretches.
It also reveals that Epstein helped broker a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia, tried to establish a backchannel with Russia during the Syria war, and facilitated a security deal between Israel and Cote d’Ivoire. These were not social favours. They were state-level services.
Vice without consequences
The leaks also lay bare something even darker: the mindset of the American elites who moved through Epstein’s world. The schedules and emails reveal men who treated him not as a danger, nor even a pariah – but as a peer, a gatekeeper, a magnet.
They sought him out, from Texas boardrooms to Emirati palaces, because he stood at the crossroads of wealth, intelligence and elite indulgence. To be noticed by him was to be noticed by the network behind him. To please him was to be invited into a world where consequences evaporated.
Epstein became the public face of a quiet, sprawling intelligence octopus. Elites did not stumble into his orbit by accident; they pursued it. They recognised that he could offer what even the presidency could not: immunity, access, indulgence, and the patronage of a foreign lobby that had perfected the art of capturing nations by feeding the appetites of their rulers.
And it was precisely this moral rot, this elite hunger for vice without consequences, that made them easy to control.
A compromised man is a manageable man. A guilty man is an obedient man. A man terrified of exposure cannot say no.
Epstein’s world – the island, the apartments, the flights – became a factory of leverage, a catalogue of weakness, a marketplace of blackmail. But Epstein was only one instrument, one tentacle.
There was also the daylight arm: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). If Epstein was the covert, psychological, compromising tool of influence, Aipac was the public, financial, legislative one. One captured the elite through their appetites; the other captured Congress through money. One seduced; the other purchased. Together, they formed the shadow and surface of the same structure.
In 2024 alone, Aipac funnelled more than $53m into American elections, backing 361 candidates across both parties. These were not donations; they were strategic acquisitions, pressure valves of compliance – signals of who was protected and who could be destroyed.
Pressure mounting
Yet something is shifting in the American political landscape. The lobby’s aura of inevitability is cracking. Its power, still immense, is beginning to overstretch.
Aipac’s annual congressional trips are collapsing. In 2023, a total of 24 first-term Democrats attended. This year, only 11 out of 33 went, with seven pulling out at the last minute after flights had been booked. Even Representative Hakeem Jeffries, once a loyal attendee, did not go.
Other representatives are recoiling as well: Massachussetts Congressman Seth Moulton returned Aipac-linked donations, while Morgan McGarvey, Valerie Foushee and Deborah Ross announced they would no longer take funds from the group.
Voters, especially young and Democratic-leaning blocs, are rejecting candidates backed by pro-Israel lobbying groups. Polls from the Arab American Institute show that such endorsements are now more likely to cost votes than bring them.
Pressure is mounting from every direction. Broadcasters and interviewers now challenge politicians live on air, puncturing the old aura of untouchability. You can see it in Senator Cory Booker squirming when asked whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal; in California Governor Gavin Newsom repeating “interesting” when the subject of Aipac is broached; and in Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro being pressed on whether the lobby distorts American policy.
Even Republicans like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie now attack the lobby openly, a sign that Aipac’s once-untouchable aura is evaporating.
As one progressive Jewish commentator put it: “They don’t fear Aipac. They fear being associated with Aipac. The political rules of the last almost half-century are changing before our eyes.”
Aipac has responded to all of this with a defensive video insisting that it is “funded by Americans”. This is not a show of confidence. It is a signal of panic.
A lobby that once inspired fear has become a liability. A badge of strength has become a mark of weakness. The winds are shifting.
Performative democracy
But here lies the paradox: the pro-Israel lobby’s domestic legitimacy might be collapsing, yet its grip on foreign policy remains intact. Influence does not disappear simply because it becomes unpopular. Power lingers in institutions long after the public has rejected it.
Public opinion can shift rapidly; machinery does not. And so, even as Democratic politicians distance themselves – as candidates refuse donations, and voters rebel – US foreign policy remains bent to Israeli priorities.
Externally, the consequences remain catastrophic. Washington’s decisions in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Iran served not American interests, but Israel’s strategic calculus – often at a staggering cost to the US.
No empire in history has subordinated its grand strategy to the anxieties of a much smaller state – except an empire whose elites are compromised, corrupted and controlled.
Internally, democracy has decayed. Elections are auctions. Representatives are assets. Public opinion is shaped by media ecosystems funded by the same networks that bankroll political careers.
“Democracy” has become a performance staged by a political class whose private lives make them permanently vulnerable.
This is the true meaning of the Epstein leaks: they expose not a single predator, but a system built on moral decay, foreign influence, intelligence engineering and elite complicity. Epstein was not an anomaly. He was the model.
Trump remains its clearest illustration – a man who wrapped himself in patriotism while tethered to foreign influence and moral ruin. His “America First” movement was theatre. The truth was always Israel First.
And so the US confronts a question that can no longer be buried: who governs the country – its elected officials, or the foreign network that owns their secrets, funds their campaigns, and exploits their corruption?
How can a nation claim sovereignty when its leaders are so easily compromised? How can a republic claim legitimacy when its elites are so cheaply bought?
How can a superpower lead the world when it cannot even govern itself? When does the US insist – not in slogans, but in action – that its government belongs to its people, not to Tel Aviv?
Author: Soumaya Ghannoushi
