When reported that William Burns, now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, held meetings with Epstein in 2014 when he was deputy secretary of state. Others who hobnobbed with Epstein in recent years include former White House counsel and Goldmach Sachs’ top lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler, linguist Noam Chomsky, and Ariane de Rothschild, the head of a Swiss private bank whom Epstein reportedly asked for help in finding a new female assistant.
A CIA spokeswoman said Burns and Epstein “had no relationship” and had only met him twice, while a Goldman spokesman said Ruemmler never flew on Epstein’s plane or visited his private island and didn’t see anything concerning at his townhouse.
Chomsky told the Journal that he met with Epstein to discuss political or academic topics and at the time, “what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
A spokesperson for de Rothschild’s bank said she was “unaware of any questions regarding his personal conduct” and that “she feels for and supports the victims.”
In 2018, the Miami Herald reported that it obtained documents showing Epstein provided “unspecified information” to the government as part of his 2008 plea deal, and that he was allegedly a key witness in the prosecution of two Bear Stearns executives. (Months later, however, Fox Business cited sources who denied Epstein was such a witness.)
“There is strong circumstantial evidence in the public domain that Epstein’s special relationship with the government explains the FBI’s failure to investigate or prosecute Epstein in 1996, the special treatment he received from 2005 to 2008, and the failure to investigate the possible wrongdoing of important public officials and powerful businessmen,” Freeman wrote.
She isn’t the only one to emphasize the FBI’s apparent decision to overlook Epstein.
In 2020, ABC News reported that a woman who was abused by Epstein in New York—and whose accusations were crucial to his Manhattan indictment—was questioned by the FBI in Florida more than a decade before. Before she could testify to a grand jury, Epstein secretly inked his non-prosecution agreement and the federal investigation died.
“I certainly think with the FBI’s capabilities, even back then, that they could have unraveled the entire network from New York to Paris to New Mexico,” Spencer Kuvin, an attorney who represented three of Epstein’s accusers in Florida, told ABC at the time.
“The potential was always there,” Kuvin added. “[The government] shut this thing down and pled this thing out before going through and talking to probably more than half of the women that were involved in this whole thing. Had they conducted a full investigation and taken their time, this would’ve been a whole different story.”
