Ross Douthat

speaker

293 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 2 Dec

Ross Douthat’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Interesting Times: She Exposed Epstein and Shares MAGA’s Anger · 2 Dec 2025 podcast

in the first Trump administration to have said, oh, he was told to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence. matched

Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote, and there have been other instances where he said he didn't know anything about Epstein's intelligence connections. matched

But first, do you think that some form of the intelligence world and Epstein's connections to it entered in at all to why he got off light the first time or anything like that? matched

Yeah, I mean, but I think I'm drawing on your view, your skepticism about the blackmail narrative. matched

There's sort of two intelligent stories you could tell. matched

In one, Epstein is literally... matched

an agent of intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. matched

government wants or what the Israeli government wants. matched

That's sort of the most extreme. matched

In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where matched

You know, Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. matched

Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence. matched

So, you know, this is a world of – matched

people who overlap with Israeli intelligence. matched

And maybe Epstein is useful as sort of a conduit of information, these kind of things, right? matched

But it's not that he's being run as a kind of entrapment ring. matched

That's sort of where I am. matched

If we don't think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is sort of doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely. matched

Good. matched

So that brings me to either my last or next to last unanswered question, right? matched

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