Multiple federal law enforcement officials who spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity say that Jeffrey Epstein hired private investigators to follow, intimidate, and surveil FBI special agents investigating allegations that he paid underage women for sex. The FBI declined Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
These new allegations about the pressure exerted on the FBI come after internal divisions in Donald Trump’s administration exploded into public view last week over its handling of files and information pertaining to the disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker. Reports across several media outlets describe a tense meeting between deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other officials. According to reports, that meeting ended with Bongino storming out. Bongino is now reportedly considering resigning from his post at the FBI.
Years after his death in prison during Trump’s first presidency, Epstein’s case continues to sow division at the highest levels of Trump’s second administration.
Trump officials confessed to Rolling Stone last week that the Department of Justice’s unwillingness to further release Epstein-related documents would inflame an already impatient and riled base. “They’re going to be so mad at us,” one official said. Trump’s pledge to release Epstein’s so-called client list was an oft-repeated campaign promise picked up and amplified by MAGA social media influencers like Tim Pool and Laura Loomer. Those same influencers are now enraged at the DOJ’s apparent stonewalling.
The Justice Department attempted to dispel conspiracy theories that Epstein was murdered by releasing 11 hours of video footage from inside the deceased financier’s jail cell last week. But the release quickly stoked even more conspiracy theories after it was discovered that the video released by the administration was missing a minute of tape. (Bondi has said the video gets reset nightly and is missing a minute at the same time every day.)
Trump, for his part, encouraged his supporters to stop inquiring about the Epstein disclosures, writing on Truth Social, “We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”
On Saturday, FBI director Kash Patel appeared to back Bondi and Trump in a post on X, writing: “The conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been. It’s an honor to serve the President of the United States @realDonaldTrump — and I’ll continue to do so for as long as he calls on me.”
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According to a report by NBC News, both Patel and Bongino have become increasingly distraught with Bondi over issues beyond the Epstein disclosures, and have registered their discontent to Justice Department leadership.
While the FBI is often first to claim credit for sweeping law enforcement operations, the bureau investigates cases at the behest of DOJ prosecutors who call the shots and define the scope of criminal charges. This often leads to tension between case agents eager to make arrests, and DOJ officials who are forced to navigate political and procedural pitfalls.
The same tension pitting Bongino and the FBI against Bondi, the attorney general, runs through a 348 page investigative report compiled by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) regarding the circumstances around Jeffrey Epstein’s 2007 plea deal.
In 2018, one year after the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, was appointed as Trump’s Secretary of Labor, The Miami Herald began publishing a sweeping series of investigations alleging that Acosta had engineered an unprecedented and illegal plea deal for Epstein, using emails between Acosta and Epstein’s attorneys to detail how a confoundingly light sentence came to pass. Acosta denied these allegations.
The deal, which Epstein took, allowed him to plead to state charges of soliciting and procuring a minor and paved the way for him to serve time through a work release program, thus evading a potential life sentence and federal charges. He also secured a non-prosecution agreement which barred Epstein’s victims from bringing claims against him while simultaneously shielding his co-conspirators from prosecution.
After the Herald’s report, congressional pressure and public discontent led to Acosta resigning from his post as labor secretary, and the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the circumstances around Epstein’s plea deal.
According to the OPR report, Special Agents assigned to investigate Epstein were repeatedly frustrated with Main Justice’s refusal to arrest and prosecute the now deceased criminal. “The FBI had ‘wanted to arrest [Epstein] in [the] Virgin Islands during a beauty pageant . . . where he [was] a judge.’ The case agent recalled that she and her co-case agent were disappointed with the decision, and that the Supervisory Special Agent was ‘extremely upset’ about it,” the report found.
OPR investigators also detail how Maria Villafana, the Assistant U.S. Attorney overseeing the prosecution, was blocked from moving forward with a planned arrest of Epstein. Villafana had coordinated with the FBI to take Epstein into custody on May 15, 2007, and the FBI had scheduled a press conference for the same day. But according to the report, DOJ managers in Miami prevented her from moving forward with the plan.
In the many months that followed, Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team would chip away at the prosecution’s efforts to seek justice, investigating DOJ official’s family members in an attempt to surface conflicts of interest, filing legal briefs from world-renowned legal experts attempting to undermine the charges, and appealing to top DOJ officials in Washington to throw out the case.
But the intimidation did not stop there. As part of its investigative series on Epstein, The Miami Herald reported that Jeffrey Epstein hired private investigators to tail and investigate the Palm Beach police officers who first brought Jeffrey Epstein to the attention of the FBI. Among them was Palm Beach Chief of Police, Michael Reiter.
“Police reports show that Epstein’s private investigators attempted to conduct interviews while posing as cops; that they picked through Reiter’s trash in search of dirt to discredit him; and that the private investigators were accused of following the girls and their families,” the Herald reported. “In one case, the father of one girl claimed he had been run off the road by a private investigator, police and court reports show.”
Two law enforcement officials who spoke with Rolling Stone confirm that the same tactics were used against FBI special agents assigned to investigate Epstein. “They put surveillance on them, they tailed them, pulled their trash, they hired private PIs to investigate the investigators,” one official says, adding that a special agent eventually moved to a gated community in an effort to reduce the constant harassment.
Epstein’s efforts to kill the investigation were so extreme that prosecutors attempted to bring obstruction of justice charges against him during his first prosecution in 2007.
The Justice Department’s OPR report records that Villafana had assembled evidence to bring two federal obstruction charges against Epstein, and that his lawyers considered accepting a plea that included them. At one point, Villafana wrote after months of stonewalling that “I am left with . . . victims, and agents all demanding to know why we aren’t presenting an indictment.”
A special agent working the Epstein case also described his efforts to delay the eventual plea deal which barred victims from seeking further reprieve. Despite his efforts to convince prosecutors to hold out on giving Epstein a sweetheart deal granting him immunity from further prosecution, the agent says he told DOJ investigators that his effort was “pushed under the rug” by senior officials at the Miami U.S. Attorney’s office.
A similar sentiment was relayed in the testimony of Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, who in 2016 testified under oath that one of the original FBI agents that interviewed her in 2006 told her five years later that he wanted to continue investigating Epstein, but that his “hands were tied” by the “chain of command” and that it didn’t look like the investigation would be going anywhere.
In addition to outstanding discrepancies with the 2006 investigation into Epstein and his subsequent plea deal, questions remain about the FBI raid on his Manhattan townhouse in 2018 and the voluminous records that were seized there. Those records remain under seal, and current DOJ leadership signaled in a memo last week that they will make no further effort to share more evidence or documentation on the Epstein case.
As tensions flared through the Department of Justice last week, Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer for multiple Epstein victims, told News Nation, “What’s really just astonishing about this recent disclosure from the government is that they know they are sitting on a treasure trove of information, and they’re not turning it over. And I’ve worked on these cases for over 10 years now — there’s a plethora of information that the public has not been able to see relating to Epstein and his co-conspirators.”
Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief who first alerted the FBI about his own department’s investigation into Epstein, was unsurprised to hear that FBI agents were intimidated alongside Palm Beach cops during the investigation into Epstein.
“This kind of stuff goes on more than people realize, picking through trash, constant surveillance,” Reiter says. “Does it surprise me that this also happened to FBI agents? Not at all.”
From Rolling Stone US
