On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy. Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein's New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild's personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal. A second set of documentsthe leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak ... sheds light on Epstein's efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. It's not clear whether the Rothschild bank ultimately participated directly in Epstein and Barak's cyberweapons efforts"but in October 2015, de Rothschild negotiated a $25 million contract with Epstein's Southern Trust Company, the same entity Epstein used to fund Barak's intelligence-linked security startup Reporty Homeland Security (now known as Carbyne) earlier that year.
Latest
Latest News
Each news summary is created according to strict standards. Here's how we do it.
Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.