David McCloskey

And his connection to Mossad, to CIA, whatever.

Just every single time, there was a question.

It's having real political repercussions, kind of creating some cracks in...

the MAGA movement, and even this past week with the events in Venezuela, we should say.

We're recording this episode just a few days after Nicolas Maduro was apprehended in Operation Absolute Resolve.

In some ways, the operation in Venezuela may have been an attempt by the Trump administration to sort of distract

the public from not releasing aspects of the Epstein files.

An idea, by the way, that I think neither of us give any credence to, but we mention it because any sort of global event, there's an effort, I think, to sort of tie it to Epstein.

The story has...

really outsized importance right now in the American political consciousness?

I don't know how it's going or how it's sort of seen in the UK.

That's right, Gordon.

And I mean, I guess it's also probably wise upfront to offer this sort of disclaimer or to flag that very often the theories and, dare I say, conspiracy theories about Epstein's connections to intelligence services

often drift into, or frankly, are motivated by, just blatant anti-Semitism.

That obviously is not a stance that we're going to be taking on The Rest Is Classified, and we're going to be looking at this question with a very kind of sober and fact-based lens to try to understand

whether there's any truth to the idea that he may have had connections to a foreign intelligence service.

Gordon, with the table set and the caveats out there, maybe it's helpful we just start with a brief setup of who Epstein was, a bit of his biography.

This will not be comprehensive, but we've crafted this with an emphasis on the sort of experiences and connections and assets he would potentially have brought to an intelligence service as we're sort of talking about the man.

So Jeffrey Epstein, born in Brooklyn.

Raised in a middle-class Jewish family.