A new congressional investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's foreign contacts is pulling his years-long relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak back into public view, alongside a disputed intelligence claim that has resurfaced in recent days through comments by Vice President JD Vance.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter this week demanding records from the Departments of Justice and State and from the intelligence community on whether Epstein acted as an unregistered foreign agent. Raskin's letter states that he has found substantial evidence Epstein worked to advance the interests of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, advised the Russian government, and served as a consultant for other foreign entities, all without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He gave the government until August 3 to turn over records tied to Epstein's contacts with foreign officials, and asked whether the government has ever investigated Epstein as a possible foreign agent.
The files Raskin is citing describe an extensive advisory relationship between Epstein and Barak. According to the House Judiciary Democrats, in 2013 Epstein advised Barak on how to approach Vladimir Putin, helped him draft a New York Times op-ed urging Moscow to abandon its support for Bashar al Assad, and helped arrange meetings with Russian officials, all while relaying information about American political figures. The same files reportedly show Epstein coaching former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon on how to structure political activity through nonprofits and intermediaries to avoid FARA disclosure requirements.
Because the House is controlled by Republicans, Raskin's demands are unlikely to receive a substantive response for now. Committee Democrats have described the letter as a preview of the investigations they intend to pursue if they retake a chamber of Congress this fall and gain subpoena power.
Where The Mossad Claim Comes From
The Israel dimension of the story predates this week's letter by months and centers on a narrower and more contested claim: that Epstein was not merely friendly with Barak but was himself connected to Mossad.
That claim traces to a 2020 FBI document built on reporting from a single confidential human source. According to that document, the source had personal contact with people close to Epstein's attorney, Alan Dershowitz, and reported taking notes on phone calls between Dershowitz and Epstein. The source told the FBI that after those calls, Mossad would contact Dershowitz for a debrief, and said the source became convinced Epstein had been trained as a spy under Barak and was a co-opted Mossad agent. The same document quoted the source alleging Donald Trump had been compromised by Israel and that Jared Kushner was the real force behind his presidency. Dershowitz has dismissed the account, telling reporters that no intelligence service would have trusted Epstein and that any such arrangement would not have been kept from his own lawyers.
Separately, the broader document trove released by the Justice Department, which runs to roughly three and a half million pages, shows that Barak visited Epstein's properties dozens of times between 2013 and 2017, sometimes for extended stays, and that Epstein paid for medical treatment for Yoni Koren, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who served as Barak's aide and was a Mossad veteran. Epstein also invested in a technology startup connected to Barak that was later rebranded as Carbyne, an emergency response software company with ties to Israel's security sector.
Vance revived the issue publicly last week, saying on the Joe Rogan Experience that Epstein seemed to be connected to elements of an Israeli deep state, while also acknowledging that the Trump administration had mishandled its messaging on the Epstein files generally. His comments sent reporters back through the document trove, most of which continued to point to the same handful of contacts around Barak rather than to new material.
The Pushback
Several figures close to the material have pushed back hard on the Mossad framing. A review by the Times of Israel found that a recorded conversation between Epstein and Barak running more than three hours never mentioned Mossad at all, and pointed to a 2018 exchange in which Epstein told Barak to make clear that he did not work for Mossad, followed by a smiley face.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called the Mossad allegations unfounded and described them as part of a smear campaign. Netanyahu has offered a pointed alternative reading, arguing that Epstein's closeness with Barak does not show Epstein worked for Israel but rather shows the opposite, and accusing Barak of using the relationship as part of a long effort to undermine Israel's elected government by working with its domestic critics on the left.
A JNS analysis went further, arguing that Epstein and Barak's dealings amounted to an effort to unseat Israel's sitting prime minister rather than any operation on Israel's behalf, concluding that Epstein was not an Israeli asset but that Israel itself was his target.
What To Watch
The two threads are related but distinct. Raskin's inquiry is a multi-country foreign agent investigation into Epstein's dealings with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, and Israel among others, aimed at extracting documents from an administration unlikely to cooperate before the midterms. That is a legitimate congressional exercise, and it treats Israel as one of several countries under the same broad lens as Riyadh and Moscow, not as a singled-out target.
The Mossad allegation is a different matter entirely, and the record so far does not support it. It rests on a single uncorroborated informant account from 2020, relayed secondhand through an FBI document, from a source who also told the bureau that both Trump and Kushner were compromised by Israel, a claim nobody in Washington has treated as credible.
Set against that is a three-hour recorded conversation between Epstein and Barak that never once mentions Mossad, and a direct message from Epstein himself denying any such tie. The officials closest to the material, Netanyahu, Bennett, and Dershowitz among them, have all rejected the framing, and the more carefully sourced Israeli reporting suggests Barak was using Epstein's money and access to work against his own government, not on its behalf. A vice president repeating a rumor on a podcast does not change the underlying evidence. Until Raskin's document request produces something more than what is already public, the Mossad claim remains, at best, an assertion in search of proof, not an established fact.
