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This is the polar opposite of an "effort-post;" this might actually be the Platonic ideal of "Reasoning From First Principles" being nothing more than Rationalists making wildly invalid assumptions, insisting they're the only logical position to have, and adamantly refusing to verify if the conclusions accurately reflect reality.
The notion that intelligence agencies would ever say "why bother, these guys are already in the bag?" is profoundly stupid; even if one's only experience with intelligence is exclusively through fiction, one would not say something so incredibly clueless, yet hewre we're holding it up as proof "Epstein was Intelligence" is tinfoil-hat territory?
For decades, some of the most successful (and aggressive) intelligence operations against the US are run by our allies; Japan, South Korea, France, Israel, and Taiwan in particular have consistently been labeled as tops threats by the U.S. National Counter Intelligence Center. Most of these efforts are focused on obtaining business, industrial, and technological secrets, but no small amount also goes into gauging just how sincere America's commitment is to our alliances. Anyone raising their hand and saying "why worry about blackmailing this rich and powerful man, he's already on our side?" would be quitely assigned to work nothing of any importance, with "advise" to their immediate supervisors to find any pretext to fire them, that wouldn't result in any problems.
Not if you wanted any chance of your intelligence operation working.
Again, "Reasoning From First Principles" being utter nonsense. Yeah, you'd like them to not do that, but if they're successful - and it is a known-fact that Epstein was named as a middleman for various African and Middle Eastern deals - you're gonna ignore that problem, until such time as you no longer can. "I can't believe X would do Y, because that would be stupid" should not ever be something that occurs to you.
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