OAN Staff Blake Wolf
3:58 PM – Sunday, July 13, 2025
Right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson claimed that deceased child sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein was working for Israel intelligence during his Friday speech at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit.
Carlson’s comments came as right-wing social media influencers have demanded the Trump administration release the files pertaining to Jeffery Epstein, as he has been suspected of running a child sex trafficking ring to extremely well connected, high profile individuals on his private island.
Conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein have propagated for over a decade claiming that the sex trafficking ring was in actuality a blackmail operation in which Epstein would film politicians and billionaires committing child sex crimes on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency to influence American foreign policy.
The conspiracy was further compounded following the release of a Daily Beast article from 2019, which reported on an interview with a former senior White House official who spoke about the reasoning behind Alex Acosta’s decision to cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007.
The article recounts Acosta, a former U.S. attorney in Miami who was in charge of Epstein’s prosecution in 2007, being interviewed for the position of labor secretary in President Donald Trump’s first administration, in which he was asked: “Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?”
Acosta allegedly responded, stating: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” according to the Daily Beast article. Acosta has since responded to the article, without either outright confirming or denying the allegation.
“I think the real answer is, Jeffery Epstein was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American. And we have every right to ask, on whose behalf was he working? How does a guy go from being a math teacher at the Dalton School in the late 70’s with no college degree, to having multiple airplanes, a private island and the largest residential house in Manhattan? Where did all the money come from?” Carlson questioned.
“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government. Now, no one’s allowed to say that foreign government is Israel, because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty,” he continued, drawing cheers from the crowd.
“There is nothing wrong about saying that, there is nothing hateful about saying that, there’s nothing anti-Semitic about saying that, there’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that. I’ve spent my entire life pretty much in Washington where I knew and loved a number of people including one very close person who worked at CIA. That has never prohibited me from saying I think the CIA has done some horrible things.”
“That doesn’t make me a disloyal American, that doesn’t make me anti-American in any sense,” Carlson added. “So criticizing the behavior of a government agency does not make you a hater, it makes you a free person. It makes you a citizen, you are allowed to do that because you’re not a slave, you’re a citizen.”
“It shouldn’t be forbidden, and yet all of us have trained ourselves to believe that you can’t say that somehow. That that’s like too naughty and forbidden and the effect of making that off limits has been to create a lot of resentment, and I’ll say it, hate online. Where people feel like they can’t just say like, ‘what the hell is this? You have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house, you have all this contact with a foreign government, were you working on behalf of Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government?’ By the way, every single person in Washington D.C. thinks that, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t think that, I don’t know any of them that hate Israel, but no one feels they can say that, why?”
Carlson’s comment was in reference to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who met with Jeffery Epstein numerous times after he was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute in Florida, requiring him to register as a sex offender.
Barak reportedly visited Epstein around 30 times between 2013 and 2017 at his Florida and New York estates, according to The Times of Israel.
Despite Carlson’s inquiry, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a memo last week concluding their investigation “revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’”
The FBI also claimed that to have found “no credible evidence” to conclude “Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” or “uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts