Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s “Israel Lobby”

Epstein and Alan Dershowitz collaborated on smear campaigns against Mearsheimer, Walt, and an underage assault victim making allegations against Epstein—in the same week.

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Jeffrey Epstein with Alan Dershowitz in 2004. Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images.

In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”

The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.

Unknown at the time, Jeffrey Epstein gave feedback on talking points to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt, and used his extensive social network to circulate allegations of anti-semitism against the two scholars. Details of Epstein’s role in the backlash to the “Israel Lobby” paper come from a trove of emails obtained by the non-profit whistleblower organization Distributed Denial of Secrets and provided to Drop Site News.

The emails from Epstein’s Yahoo! account have been covered in part by Bloomberg, but his correspondence over Walt and Mearsheimer’s work has not previously been reported. Bloomberg conducted cryptographic verification on the email cache that they said “strongly authenticated a portion of the emails; corroborated sources of important enclosures; and found no meaningful evidence of fakery,” though evidence suggested that some emails were deleted. The source for the DDoS cache stated that they were not the source for Bloomberg—a statement DDoS said is supported by slight variations in the scope of the email tranche.

The cache shows that, during the first week of April 2006, Epstein received multiple early drafts of an attack piece by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz titled “Debunking the Newest - and Oldest - Jewish Conspiracy.” In it, Dershowitz, who also served as Epstein’s defense attorney in his criminal matters, accused Mearsheimer and Walt of recycling “discredited trash” from neo-Nazi and Islamist websites, accusing them of authoring a modern counterpart to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Epstein responded to Dershowitz’s email, “terrific…congragulations (sic).”

Correspondence between Epstein and Dershowitz’s office, April 1, 2006.

A few hours later, Epstein received another message from Dershowitz’s email address, signed off by an assistant. The assistant asked Epstein to help circulate copies of the attack piece, writing, “Jeffrey, were you going to distribute this for Alan?? If I should forward this to someone in your office, pls let me know.” Epstein replied in the affirmative: “yes I’ve started.”

Correspondence between Epstein and Dershowitz’s office, April 5, 2006.

Despite holding no formal role, Epstein was a powerful figure at Harvard. He had spent years cultivating relationships at the university, donating more than $9 million between 1998 and 2008, and positioning himself as a fixer and patron for high-profile academics, including Dershowitz and economist Larry Summers—who was the president of Harvard at the time.

At the time, Epstein served as trustee and president of the family financial office of billionaire fashion tycoon Leslie Wexner, which donated nearly $20 million to the Kennedy School between 2000 and 2006. The Harvard Gazette described The Wexner Foundation’s contributions as “underwriting core operating expenses” for the school. The foundation also funded a visiting scholar program, the Wexner Israel Fellowship Program, which allowed ten Israeli government officials to attend the Kennedy School each year for a one-year master’s degree.

The behind-the-scenes campaign of subversion ironically affirmed the key tenets of the Walt and Mearsheimer paper. In other words, wealthy and well-connected men were deploying their financial resources and connections in order to undercut a paper claiming that wealthy and well-connected men were using their wealth and financial resources for the benefit of the state of Israel and against the interests of the United States.

The consequences of a coordinated smear campaign by elite members of media and academia were dire for Mearsheimer and Walt. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs canceled a scheduled talk by the pair in 2007, after pressure from pro-Israel supporters. Other institutions that previously welcomed them to speak now insisted that any appearance be “balanced” by an opposing speaker who was sympathetic to Israel. The backlash narrowed their platform in mainstream media, academia, and think tanks for years while making public appearances more difficult.

In recent years, Mearsheimer has gained a new audience thanks to the profusion of independent media and YouTube channels where he has appeared as a commentator. “I’m not surprised to see these emails, because Dershowitz and Epstein were close and both have a passionate attachment to Israel,” Mearsheimer told Drop Site. Walt declined to comment.

“An injustice is about to be done”

During the very same week Epstein and Dershowitz were coordinating an effort to ruin the academic careers of Walt and Mearsheimer, the convicted sex offender was also discussing with his lawyer strategies for destroying the credibility of a young woman who had accused Epstein of sexual abuse. That case has since garnered significant international attention. It is disconnected from the response to Walt and Mearsheimer, but, in hindsight, it is startling to see that the men working behind the scenes to undercut their paper were simultaneously engaged in a campaign to discredit a child accuser of a man who would become globally notorious in years to come.

In 2005, Epstein came to the attention of the Palm Beach Police Department after a 16-year-old girl and her family reported a sexual assault two years earlier at his mansion on El Brillo Way. The investigation eventually identified dozens of alleged victims over the following year, and Epstein’s case was taken to the state’s attorney Barry Krischer.

On April 10, 2006, five days after Dershowitz published his response to “The Israel Lobby” working paper, Epstein sent Dershowitz, who was also his lawyer, some information obtained by a private investigator to consider sharing it with the state’s attorney to undermine testimony against him. The letter from Epstein accused his underage accuser of consuming drugs, shoplifting, and engaging in other sexual activity, arguing that the dirt he had obtained undermined her character and credibility. He also attacked the personal history of her family members.

The financier and power broker also expressed disappointment that he was still facing legal scrutiny for his actions at all. Epstein remonstrated the prosecutor, stating, “I hope you recognize that I am quite surprised by the recent turn of events, after you advised me almost two months ago that I was to just ‘chill’ ,advice I followed and then was subsequently advised that you were now satisfied that the case was to ‘fizzle.’” Epstein proposed asking Krischer for an opportunity to come to Florida for a “face to face all-hands meeting” where he could present “exculpatory evidence” prior to any Grand Jury.

Epstein ultimately pleaded guilty to reduced state charges in 2008 in a wildly controversial plea deal that immunized unnamed co-conspirators, and saw him evade federal prosecution. He served only 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, with six days per week on 12-hour work release outside the jail.

His personal relationship with Summers went on seemingly unimpeded by his conviction and imprisonment for child sex abuse. Recent disclosures from the House Oversight Committee show that Epstein and Summers continued to communicate up until the time of his death in 2019, including messages the previous year in which Summers sought his romantic advice regarding an individual who he said viewed him as a mentor.

The attacks against Walt and Mearsheimer, meanwhile, continued after they expanded their working paper into a book in 2007. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The New Republic, denounced them for antisemitism, compared their perspective to that of Osama bin Laden, and warned that its logic revived “an ancient idea spread by anti-Jewish ideologues: that Jews, operating in the shadows, manipulate gentile leaders.” Invoking a notorious antisemitic radio host from the 1930s to describe the scholars, Goldberg went on to proclaim that their book was “the most sustained attack… against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.”

These attacks had a suitably chilling effect on the academy for years, where discussions about the influence of pro-Israel pressure groups remains taboo despite the importance of the issue to U.S. foreign policy. In 2016, roughly a decade after The Atlantic backed out of publishing Walt and Mearsheimer’s article in the face of public pressure, Goldberg was named its editor in chief.