Vance ties Epstein to ‘highest levels’ of US and Israeli intelligence, accuses Israel of sabotaging his Iran deal

WASHINGTON (MNTV) — US Vice President JD Vance has said that Jeffrey Epstein was connected to the upper reaches of both American and Israeli intelligence, while separately accusing elements within the Israeli government of financing a covert campaign to wreck his own diplomatic efforts with Iran.

The remarks came during a sprawling interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that ran close to three hours and racked up more than a million YouTube views within a day — an appearance that also served, in the view of many observers, as an early platform for a man positioning himself to succeed Donald Trump in 2028.

“Mossad or CIA or some other deep state”

Roughly an hour and three-quarters into the conversation, Rogan put to Vance the theory that circulates persistently around the disgraced financier: that Epstein worked for Israel’s external intelligence service.

Vance did not dismiss it.

He said Epstein had clearly maintained connections to the highest levels of American intelligence and, equally clearly, to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence — allowing that the answer might be Mossad, the CIA, some other country’s apparatus, or a combination.

He drew one distinction with some care.

Epstein’s Israeli connections, he said, ran to elements of what he called the Israeli deep state that sat left of centre — most notably former prime minister and defence minister Ehud Barak — rather than to the political right.

In the United States, by contrast, Epstein cultivated friendships across the political spectrum in a way he did not appear to manage in Israel.

Vance, who has described himself as “an OG Epstein conspiracy theorist,” conceded that no document exists linking Epstein directly to any intelligence service.

Then he added a caveat that undercut the concession: if such a document had ever existed, it would not still be around in 2026.

What files actually show

A memo produced by the FBI’s Los Angeles field office in October 2020 recorded that one of the bureau’s sources had come to believe Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent who had been trained as a spy.

The documents also revealed extensive email correspondence between Epstein and senior Israeli figures, including Barak and Mossad veteran Yoni Koren, a regular guest at Epstein’s New York residence.

The exchanges suggest a relationship close enough that Epstein reportedly covered the cost of Koren’s cancer treatment in 2012. His foundation also channelled money to Israeli causes, including a $25,000 donation to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and $15,000 to the Jewish National Fund.

The speculation has been persistent enough that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed it directly on social media in February, arguing that Epstein’s unusually close relationship with Barak — a political rival — proved the opposite of what conspiracy theorists claimed.

Epstein, who was found dead in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, had earlier pleaded guilty in Florida to procuring a minor for prostitution, a 2008 conviction his critics have long described as a sweetheart deal. His victims have alleged he ran a trafficking network serving the global elite.

“We absolutely screwed up”

Vance was unusually blunt about his own administration’s handling of the files, saying flatly that the communications operation around them had been botched.

He defended former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired in April amid the fallout, saying he did not believe anything malicious had taken place at the Justice Department.

Bondi, he suggested, had been trying to meet a political moment and had overstated what the department actually possessed — most notoriously when she claimed an Epstein client list was sitting on her desk, an assertion that proved untrue.

She was publicly savaged for it, Vance said, and the episode bred distrust in the administration’s transparency efforts.

But he rejected the inference many have drawn. The reason the messaging failed, he insisted, was not that anyone was concealing anything.

Iran allegation

The more explosive material may have been Vance’s account of what happened to his Iran diplomacy.

The vice president, who led negotiations that produced a memorandum of understanding with Tehran last month — an agreement that has since collapsed, with the US and Iran again trading strikes — described a discreet and extremely well-funded campaign to derail both the talks and the deal itself.

Certain American influencers, he said, are being paid to attack it, with the money originating from Israel.

He pointed to reporting in Time magazine this week detailing an alleged Israeli influence operation aimed at the MAGA base, in which Brad Parscale, a digital adviser on Trump’s 2020 campaign, is reportedly receiving $1.5 million a month to run the effort.

The article, Vance said, names people who have been paid through that channel and who are now attacking him viciously.

He went further, saying he knew beyond any doubt that figures within the Israeli government had been working to pull American policy away from negotiations because they wanted the military campaign to continue.

Asked whether the United States would have gone to war with Iran absent Israeli influence, Vance answered simply: yes.

He was careful to add that Trump’s opposition to an Iranian nuclear weapon was, in his view, independently held and not a product of outside pressure — a position Vance said he shares.

And when Rogan raised the possibility that Israel might be using the Epstein files, or some other leverage, to bend Trump to its will, Vance called the notion of the president being blackmailed crazy.

A vice president positioning himself

Throughout the interview, Vance framed himself as occupying the sensible centre of what he called a massive pro-Israel, anti-Israel argument consuming American politics.

He noted that he has been widely accused of antisemitism, a charge he described as insane, and challenged his hawkish critics to explain what they would do instead.

The performance was notable less for any single revelation — no proof of Epstein’s alleged intelligence ties was produced, and none exists in the public record — than for the fact of who was saying it.

A sitting American vice president lending credence to theories about Israeli intelligence penetration, publicly accusing elements of a close ally’s government of buying American influencers to sabotage his own diplomacy, and conceding that the administration mishandled the most politically radioactive document release in years, represents a striking departure from the language of official Washington.

Whether it reflects genuine frustration, a calculated appeal to a base increasingly sceptical of foreign entanglements, or both, will likely become clearer as 2028 approaches.