Declassified UK : What have we learned from the Epstein files?
Posted: 21st November 2025
Last week, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
The global media has largely focussed on how the emails are damning for US president Donald Trump, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in relation to the late paedophile.
In one of the emails, dated January 2019, Epstein wrote of Trump: “Of course, he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”.
Another message shows Epstein asking a New York Times journalist if he wanted “photos of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen”.
Epstein, who died in 2019, also outlined his contempt for Trump in private messages. “I have met some very bad people”, he wrote. “None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body”.
White House press secretary Karoline Levitt said the emails have been “selectively leaked” by Democrats to “liberate [the] media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump”.
Both chambers of the US congress have now agreed to order the US justice department to release further files from the Epstein estate, with the House of Representatives voting 427-1 in favour.
But the emails cast light on much more than Trump.
One of them appears to contradict the account of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, regarding his relationship with Virginia Giuffre.
“Yes she [Giuffre] was on my plane and yes she had her photo taken with Andrew”, Epstein wrote in July 2011. Andrew has previously suggested the photo was a fake.
Lord Peter Mandleson, who was sacked as Britain’s ambassador in Washington over his links with Epstein, also appears in the new tranche of emails.
He was in contact with Epstein as late as 2016, writing about his new life in the US. This was eight years after Epstein had first pled guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor.
Yet perhaps the most interesting new emails – and those most overlooked in the Western press – relate to Epstein’s close relationship with Israel and its security agencies.
Epstein repeatedly hosted a senior Israeli military intelligence officer in his Manhattan mansion between 2013 and 2015, according to an investigation by Drop Site News.
These emails came from a separate tranche of documents hacked by a group named Handala and uploaded onto a file-sharing database named Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS).
Epstein also brokered security agreements between Israel and Mongolia and Cote d’Ivoire, and worked with Ehud Barak on targeting Israel’s adversaries, according to those same leaks.
“As these stories pile up, it has become increasingly difficult to deny that Epstein was, at minimum, an asset for Israeli intelligence”, wrote journalist Branko Marcetic.
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