(JTA) — Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett shot back at claims by pundit Tucker Carlson that the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had been working for Israel as part of a blackmail operation.
“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,” wrote Bennett in a post on X Monday.
“Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel. Epstein never worked for the Mossad,” Bennett continued. “This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t.”
Bennett’s post on Monday morning came amid a surge in tensions over Epstein, who allegedly ran an international sex trafficking ring, within President Donald Trump’s MAGA base, ignited last week after the Department of Justice concluded that Epstein did not maintain a client list. That marked a sharp reversal of Trump’s campaign promise to reveal the sex offender’s clientele.
On Friday, Carlson raised the Epstein issue during a speech at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, posing what he said was the real question about Epstein: “Why was he doing this, on whose behalf, and where was the money coming from?”
| RELATED: Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
Later, Carlson answered his own question, stating that it was “extremely obvious” that Epstein “had direct connections to a foreign government” — Israel.
“Now, no one’s allowed to say that foreign government is Israel, because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty,” Carlson said. “There is nothing wrong with saying that, there’s nothing hateful about saying that, there’s nothing antisemitic about saying that — there’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that!”
Carlson has long faced allegations of antisemitism, including over his promotion of white supremacist ideas while on Fox News and his hosting of a Holocaust denier on his X stream last year.
More recently, he has been at the vanguard of a different divide within the MAGA movement over foreign policy, centering on Israel. Carlson and others heavily criticized Trump’s decision to join Israel’s military offensive against Iran’s nuclear program, with Carlson accusing Trump of being “complicit” in Israel’s “act of war.”
Bennett associated Carlson’s comments about Epstein to other misinformation that spreads about Israel.
“They just make things up, say it with confidence and these lies stick, because it’s Israel,” he wrote in the post on X. “There’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won’t take it anymore.”
Conspiracy theories about Epstein, who was Jewish, having connections to the Israeli government have been widespread since his arrest in 2019 and subsequent suicide in his jail cell. Epstein had ties to several Israeli and Jewish individuals during his alleged crimes, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who was frequently spotted leaving Epstein’s New York apartment.
According to a private calendar of Epstein’s recovered in 2023, the disgraced financier and child sexual abuser also allegedly met with other prominent Jews including linguist and left-wing activist Noam Chomsky, the longtime Bard College president Leon Botstein and the filmmaker Woody Allen.
