A document dated December 13, 2017, which is a summary of information provided by a confidential FBI source, states that, according to the informant, “Epstein was President Vladimir Putin's wealth manager and provided the same services to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.” No additional details were provided. The document is marked “secret” and “not for foreigners” (NF).
Who was Vladimir Putin's estate manager according to the informant?
Who did Epstein want to meet?
What contacts did Epstein have with Russians?
What PR services did Epstein use?
It also contains a number of other claims by an informant whose identity was blurred in the document. This person also claimed, among other things, that Epstein “had a property in New Mexico where he lured and recorded underage women”, “had hooks on other people” and met Donald Trump for lunch in the spring of 2015, i.e. long after Trump was supposed to break off his long-term relationship with Epstein.
The document also mentions that the billionaire allegedly had a “private hacker” from Italy who had a talent for finding vulnerabilities in IT systems and sold his cyber tools, among others. services from the USA, Great Britain, but also Hezbollah and the Central African Republic. However, he was afraid of Russia and never traveled there. According to Corriere della Sera, the description of this person fits Vinzenzo Iozzo, former vice president of the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike.
The Epstein scandal. “It would be easy to get his attention.”
The document in question is Form FD-1023, which contains unverified information provided to the FBI by informants. It is unclear whether or how the FBI used this information. In one of Epstein's e-mails to investor Joichi Ito in 2014, the billionaire, answering a question about whether he was “friends with Mugabe”, said no, but added that “it would be easy to get his attention”.
Other documents published by the Ministry of Justice show that Epstein maintained contacts with a number of Russians with ties to the Kremlin. In one of the e-mails to the Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin, he wrote that he knew a “friend of Putin”, and repeatedly discussed the possibility of meeting Putin himself, seeking to organize talks with the Russian leader with former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland. In 2013, he told former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that he did not agree to the proposal to meet Putin during the economic forum in St. Petersburg, adding that “if (Putin) wants to meet, he will have to allocate real time and privacy.”
In 2018, before Trump's meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Epstein instructed Jagland to tell Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that he would be happy to share his observations about Trump, as he did in talks with the late Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.
Meile Epstein. The billionaire contacted these people
As revealed last year by the Dossier Center group, associated with the Russian opposition businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Epstein maintained close contacts with Sergei Belyakov, who was responsible for organizing the international economic forum in St. Petersburg (SPIEF), and according to Dossier, he was in fact an agent of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Epstein also wrote that the meeting was proposed to him by the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia, Alexei Simanovsky, whom he described as the man responsible for Russia's response to Western sanctions. In an e-mail to Norwegian diplomat Terje Rod-Larsen in 2014, Epstein wrote that he would like to seek the opinion of Bill Burns, then deputy head of the US Department of State (2011-2014) and later head of the CIA (2021-2025), with whom Epstein met many times. From 2005 to 2008, Burns was the US ambassador to Russia.
Previously disclosed files also proved that Epstein used the PR services of Maria Drokova, a former protégé of well-known Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov, who became famous as a prominent activist of the pro-Putin youth group “Nasi” and later founded an investment fund in Silicon Valley.
