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Notes -
Personally, I am not unconvinced of the murder theory based on priors. Epstein's testimony wrt any clients of his would likely not have convinced any jury. I would basically have expected him to accuse everyone up to the pope and the holy spirit if it means that he got to spend another day in a courthouse instead of his cell.
He would only have been more than an inconvenience for his murderers if he had more evidence besides his testimony, such as videos of his clients abusing minors. But the way digital storage works makes it unlikely that he had a copy of that evidence on him when he died, and even more unlikely that it was the only copy.
That guy was obviously not stupid. Even if he literally had nobody whom he could trust (which I doubt), schemes to set up a dead man's switch are not that hard to set up. For the purpose of anyone which was blackmailing him, he could have set up any number of horcruxes, and killing him before you have found all of them would be fatal. Sending a letter to a random attorney with 1000$ of cash and instructions to forward an encrypted message (or the decryption key) to the media in case of your death is something which could work and will be very hard to find even if you are closely observing someone.
From a game theory perspective, this seems like a scenario where the best interests of both Epstein and any blackmailed high level government official would be to cooperate. If your opponent has the power to murder you (or even influence in what prison you end up), then cutting a deal with the prosecutor (which would likely not have greatly reduced your sentence) would have been a bad idea. And if there is a 20% chance that your blackmailer will be able to leak the dirt on his death, then offing them seems like a terrible risk. Much better to meet in the middle where he tells the prosecutor that only he fucked anyone, and then gets quietly moved to a facility where he does not face the risk of prison rape, and perhaps gets pardoned after a decade or so.
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Of course, if he was a full-time Mossad agent, then it is plausible that he did not have unfettered access to any incriminating video material, or anything incriminating Mossad. Killing him would then be a matter of tying up loose ends and avoiding embarrassing if unsubstantiated accusations.
I do not believe this theory for other reasons. It is not like supporting Israel is so icky in American politics that only someone who was blackmailed would possibly even consider it. Your average congressman is happy to vote in Israel's interest in exchange for AIPAC support. Running an underage sex ring would threaten this status quo (which is great for Israel) if it became public knowledge.
The risks/rewards would be different if it was an intelligence op by a country which the US generally hates, like Iran or North Korea. Blackmailing a dozen officials into being inexplicably reluctant with sanctions would be valuable, and if the op becomes public knowledge, the relations between the US and the country can hardly get much worse -- nobody is going to invade Iran over an underage sex blackmail ring.
Still, I think that any country who ran such an op would put someone more reliable than Epstein in charge.
To the lawyers in the audience: are random requests like this common? I realize direct anecdotes might be subject to confidentiality, but are these sorts of things heard of?
No. This is Frederick Forsyth novel stuff.
The most likely outcome from doing so would be that the weird letter would be reported to the police/fbi/whoever.
I would just keep the money and forward whatever they sent me to whoever the instructions said to send it to. More likely, I'd look at it and give the scoop to a local TV producer I know. That way, in addition to the big story, there will be a sub-drama of how a guy who mostly did sports stories for a station in Pittsburgh managed to break the story of the century.
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