Seriously, look at the chain of command. He was in a US federal prison. US federal prisons are run by a branch of the Department of Justice. The head of the Department of Justice was William Barr, whose father was a retired OSS agent who gave Epstein his first job.
By this logic anybody important who dies in prison is murdered, because there’s always going to be some seven degrees to Kevin Bacon connection between powerful people and someone in the US federal government nominally in charge of either the prison or the DoJ. This is something we can predict, in advance, without learning anything else about the case except the parties involved. And also according to this logic we should assume this connection means murder even if, in practice, the gears say they can’t effectively unilaterally affect the investigation.
Shall we talk further about Barr? His father was OSS, and thereby was plausibly the man who ushered Epstein into the covert world. Barr’s own first job was for seven years at the CIA, it’s where he first got into law and politics. As Attorney-General for Bush 41, he’s said to have impeded investigation of BCCI, and he definitely made the case for pardoning several Iran-Contra figures. After the cold war, he settled into civilian life in the telecom and media sectors for several decades, until Trump brought him back.
The whole first stage of Barr’s career coincided with the establishment of a new system of political oversight of CIA activities, and then the growth of an alternative, informal, unsupervised network whose epitome was Iran-Contra. (Today’s generation might think of it all as similar to the post-Snowden turmoil surrounding NSA, though many details are very different.)
My point is that Barr has inside experience, managing the legal fallout of extralegal covert activities with discretion. Of course, it’s a long way from getting rogue operators a presidential pardon, to having the ultimate rogue operator die in jail before he can make it to court, but those long years were precisely the period of time during which Epstein’s operation ballooned out of control. Perhaps it required the chaos of the Trump years, and the work of old hands like Barr, to finally bring him down.
By this logic anybody important who dies in prison is murdered, because there’s always going to be some seven degrees to Kevin Bacon connection between powerful people and someone in the US federal government nominally in charge of either the prison or the DoJ. This is something we can predict, in advance, without learning anything else about the case except the parties involved. And also according to this logic we should assume this connection means murder even if, in practice, the gears say they can’t effectively unilaterally affect the investigation.
But hey, there’s always the 10% ¯\(ツ)/¯
Shall we talk further about Barr? His father was OSS, and thereby was plausibly the man who ushered Epstein into the covert world. Barr’s own first job was for seven years at the CIA, it’s where he first got into law and politics. As Attorney-General for Bush 41, he’s said to have impeded investigation of BCCI, and he definitely made the case for pardoning several Iran-Contra figures. After the cold war, he settled into civilian life in the telecom and media sectors for several decades, until Trump brought him back.
The whole first stage of Barr’s career coincided with the establishment of a new system of political oversight of CIA activities, and then the growth of an alternative, informal, unsupervised network whose epitome was Iran-Contra. (Today’s generation might think of it all as similar to the post-Snowden turmoil surrounding NSA, though many details are very different.)
My point is that Barr has inside experience, managing the legal fallout of extralegal covert activities with discretion. Of course, it’s a long way from getting rogue operators a presidential pardon, to having the ultimate rogue operator die in jail before he can make it to court, but those long years were precisely the period of time during which Epstein’s operation ballooned out of control. Perhaps it required the chaos of the Trump years, and the work of old hands like Barr, to finally bring him down.