Jason Leopold

With every new development in this story I am even more gobsmacked that Epstein and his co-conspirators escaped accountability over and over and over again. There's more to come from my investigation. Stay tuned.

It's not all bad though. Fugazi has officially released the Steve Albini sessions for In On The Killtaker

fugazi.bandcamp.com/album/albini...

OMG! 🤬

NSA takes 12 years to send @jasonleopold.bsky.social an UNCLASSIFIED report on how the agency is (or, more accurately, isn't) addressing overclassification. 😬

The report doesn't quantify how much is overclassified, but a former director once quipped that a merry christmas email was top secret.

Happy FOIA Friday! I’ve been deep in the muck working on another story. But I don’t want to leave you empty handed so I’m sharing an inspector general report I received this week from the National Security Agency. The documents arrived via snail mail. I was excited when I saw the manila envelope in my mailbox. It had some weight. I immediately tore it open and read the letter: “This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated 13 February 2014 ... I apologize for the delay in getting this document to you.”

“This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated 13 February 2014 ... I apologize for the delay in getting this document to you.”

Cover sheet to NSA report on overclassification

Happy #FOIA Friday? Not really

A Harvard University spokesperson told Bloomberg News that the campus police’s query occurred on Nov. 6, 2013, a day before a meeting between officials on whether Harvard would reconsider its position of no longer accepting gifts from Epstein. A 2020 report by Harvard said it did not reverse the ban

A spokesperson for the Secret Service said the agency was unable to track down records related to the query because “records from 2014 fall outside the applicable federal records retention schedule for this category of information.”

The query by the Secret Service’s White House division in Aug 2014 suggests that Epstein may have been vetted because he was expected to come into contact with the agency’s protectees, such as the president, or a protected government site.

The target profile showed that more than a dozen law enforcement agencies in the US and abroad, including Harvard’s police department, the US Secret Service and the agency’s White House division, queried a national crime database 311 times between 2013 and 2015 for information about Epstein.

Bloomberg is not revealing the identities of six women who were also named as targets by the DEA either because they could not be located or because publicly available information indicates that they could be considered victims of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.

Ossa is a real estate company owned by Mark Epstein. Anthony Barrett, who was an executive at Ossa Properties, was also named in the target profile. Some of Epstein's victims have said in civil lawsuits that they were sexually abused in a building managed by Ossa Properties.

The two businesses are Wagging Tail Entertainment and Ossa Properties Inc. Peggy Siegal, an entertainment publicist and friend of Epstein’s, did business under Wagging Tail, according to multiple emails in the DOJ’s Epstein documents.

They include Epstein’s lawyer, Darren Indyke; his brother, Mark; and his accountants, Bella Klein, Harry Beller and Richard Kahn. Indyke and Kahn are co-executors of Epstein’s estate. Epstein died while in federal custody in August 2019.

The 12 individuals and two businesses were redacted from the document the DOJ released. Bloomberg has learned their identities from the people familiar with the matter.

A DEA agent told OCDETF the agency needed the information to support an investigation into money laundering, drug trafficking and the procurement of Eastern European prostitutes for high profile clientele, the people familiar with the matter said.

A few months later, on April 28, 2015, the DEA requested that OCDETF’s fusion center prepare a “target profile” on Epstein, 12 other individuals and two businesses.

But in a twist, one suspected drug trafficker became an informant and told federal agents that Epstein had been involved in the funding and distribution of ecstasy, ketamine and methamphetamines, the people familiar with the matter said. The informant also said that Epstein ran a prostitution ring.

Around January 2015, the lead DEA agent on Operation Chain Reaction wrote in a status update that he expected the case to wrap up in a few months after all the defendants were sentenced, the five people familiar with the investigation said.

They brought charges against a police officer in Suffolk County, New York for extortion, narcotics distribution and counterfeiting. At least two of the cases involved the distribution of ketamine.

In May 2011, OCDETF formally launched an operation called Chain Reaction. Over the next four years, federal authorities targeted and prosecuted nearly a dozen people in New York, including associates of the Genovese crime family, on various racketeering charges

OCDETF, as it’s called, worked jointly on investigations with other agencies to combat illicit finance and take down transnational criminal networks.

The following year, the DEA requested the help of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, a Reagan-era Justice Department division made up of hundreds of prosecutors and thousands of intelligence and law enforcement personnel from across the federal govt.

One person who’d been arrested in connection with the probe had attempted to ship a package to Florida containing ecstasy tablets and ketamine, a drug known to facilitate date rape.

In Dec 2010, long before Epstein or anyone in his circle surfaced in their probe, the DEA and the FBI started investigating a drug trafficking operation in nightclubs in NY, NJ, NV, Fla, SC, & Mexico, according to the five people familiar with the case.

Foreign governments did likewise. The US Secret Service’s White House division and Harvard University’s campus police conducted background checks on Epstein years after he was released from custody in Florida.

The documents show that law enforcement agencies kept tabs on Epstein by tracking his movements, building dossiers on his connections and following his money as it moved through offshore accounts.

These new details about the investigation deepen the mystery surrounding the serial sex abuser, and reveal a striking level of scrutiny into him that extended beyond the federal sex-crimes probe that has captured international attention for years.

Initial information about the 2015 investigation surfaced in January in a heavily redacted document that was released by the DOJ.

The individuals named in a document related to the investigation, according to the people, included Epstein’s accountants, attorneys and European women who worked as his assistants or fashion models. The DEA investigation also named two businesses.

It began after an informant told authorities that Epstein was involved in the illicit funding and distribution of so-called club drugs, including ecstasy, ketamine and methamphetamines, according to the people