On Friday, just following the release of key documents, Vanity Fair reported: “Unsealed Epstein Documents Reveal Powerful Men and Disturbing New Details.” The magazine noted: “Glenn Dubin, Bill Richardson, George Mitchell, and others are mentioned. ‘A lot of important people are going to have a really bad weekend,’ said a source.”

The New York Times is reporting: “Soon after Mr. Epstein was found dead of an apparent suicide in a federal jail on Saturday, Geoffrey S. Berman, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said his office’s investigation would continue, and pointedly mentioned that the government’s indictment against Mr. Epstein included a conspiracy charge.”

Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post tweeted Saturday: “People close to Epstein fear he was murdered … as Epstein told authorities someone tried to kill him in a previous incident weeks earlier. He was described as being in good spirits in recent days.”

Bruce Barket, the lawyer for Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein’s former cell mate, said that several weeks ago, Epstein “tried to hang himself, and our client was able to alert the authorities and prevent it.” Tartaglione was then removed from the cell and not immediately replaced, one of several apparent breaches of protocol that seem to have made Epstein’s alleged suicide possible.

See accuracy.org news release of a month ago on some of Epstein’s connections to clandestine agencies, via Donald Barr, Attorney General William Barr’s father, who was in the OSS; and the younger Barr (who was with the CIA, the successor of the OSS), who helped cover up the Iran Contra scandal.

WHITNEY WEBB, wwebb at mintpressnews.com, @_whitneywebb

Webb is a reporter for MintPress News based in Chile. She also co-hosts the MintCast podcast with Alan MacLeod.

While Trump and other Republicans have put out theories that the Clintons were involved in the death of Epstein and some Democrats are alleging that Trump was behind it, Webb stresses the need to look at the deeper forces, known facts and histories around Epstein’s network. She has written a series of pieces including “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case,” which states that “Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s ‘sweetheart’ deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for ‘intelligence.’

“Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.”

In “Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era,” Webb describes a “young William Barr” helping in “stonewalling the congressional Pike Committee and Church Committee, which investigated the CIA beginning in 1975. Among the things that they were tasked with investigating were the CIA’s ‘love traps,’ or sexual blackmail operations used to lure foreign diplomats to bugged apartments, complete with recording equipment and two-way mirrors.”

In “Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,” Webb examines the role of Epstein’s main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner. She also writes: “The Maxwell family has become a source of renewed media interest following Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest, as Ghislaine Maxwell, long described in the media as a British ‘socialite,’ was publicly cited as Epstein’s long-time ‘on and off’ girlfriend, and Epstein’s victims, as well as former wives of Epstein’s friends, have claimed that she … procured underage girls for his sexual blackmail operation. Ghislaine Maxwell is also alleged to have engaged in the rape of the girls she procured for Epstein and to have used them to produce child pornography.”