Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett denied political commentator Tucker Carlson’s claim that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had worked for Israeli intelligence.
The former Fox News host told attendees at the Turning Point USA summit on Friday that “every single person in Washington, D.C.” thinks that the convicted child abuser, who was Jewish and committed suicide in jail in 2019, worked for the Israeli government.
“I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t think that,” Carlson said. “I don’t know any of them that hate Israel. But no one feels they can say that.”
Bennett, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2021 to 2022, denied the claim on Monday.
“As a former Israeli prime minister, with the Mossad having reported directly to me, I say to you with 100% certainty, the accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false,” Bennett wrote.
“Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel,” he said.
“This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t,” he added. “They just make things up, say it with confidence, and these lies stick because it’s Israel. There’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won’t take it anymore.”
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs, also weighed in with an open letter to Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk, arguing that Carlson should not have been given a platform.
“As you have noted, there is no evidence—none—that Epstein was acting on behalf of the State of Israel,” Chikli wrote. “Yet the message conveyed at your conference, with Tucker Carlson as keynote speaker just days after his sycophantic interview with the Iranian terror regime, was unmistakable: Israel was behind Epstein.”
“We have a serious problem. A wave of antisemitism—the likes of which America hasn’t seen since the 1930s—is gathering momentum,” he added. “And so I’m asking you: please stay true to your strong moral compass and speak out against antisemitism, whether it comes from the woke left or the woke right.”
‘Hottest’ country in the world
Epstein has returned to headlines in recent days after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo on July 7 denying that Epstein maintained any “client list” of fellow pedophiles and confirming that his death was a suicide.
Those conclusions sparked outrage among right-wing conspiracy theorists, who believe that Epstein ran a pedophile prostitution ring for elite Democrats and may have been murdered in jail to conceal left-wing sex trafficking of children.
Epstein maintained prominent connections with American and foreign politicians, including the Clinton family, Donald Trump and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. In 2020, Oslo Accords negotiator Terje Rod-Larsen was forced to resign from the International Peace Institute in New York after it was revealed that he received more than $100,000 from Epstein.
Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI and a former right-wing media commentator, has reportedly not gone to work since Wednesday in protest against Bondi’s findings.
U.S. President Donald Trump backed his attorney general in a social media post on Saturday.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ ” Trump wrote. “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a fantastic job.”
“Let Pam Bondi do her job; she’s doing great,” the president wrote. “One year ago, our country was dead; now it’s the ‘hottest’ country anywhere in the world. Let’s keep it that way—and not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
