by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain at Drop Site News
The Wexner Foundation has long claimed Epstein “did not make decisions regarding the use of Foundation’s funds.” New emails show that is flagrantly false.
Our latest article on the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein is based on a cache of emails obtained by the whistleblower nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which provided access to them to Drop Site News. The cache includes the undisclosed names of Epstein victims as well as explicit images, meaning it can’t simply be published in whole without some redactions. But many of the messages can quickly be made public, and to that end Drop Site is collaborating with the team that built Jmail to make new emails available and searchable there, beginning this week, and rolling out continuously as we vet the remainder of the cache. (Jmail is a searchable inbox of Epstein’s emails that mimics Gmail.)
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Six months after Jeffrey Epstein’s death in August 2019, the philanthropic foundation founded by billionaire fashion tycoon Leslie Wexner published an “independent review” of Epstein’s involvement in the organization, in response to concerns raised by donors and alumni of foundation-funded programs. The Wexner Foundation is one of the largest contributors to pro-Israel causes in the U.S.
The review claimed that Wexner Foundation staff had “no contact” with Epstein after his resignation as a trustee in September 2007, and, before that, he had “played no role in the management or administration of the Foundation’s operations,” had “no meaningful role in the Foundation’s budget [or] finances,” and “did not make decisions regarding the use of Foundation’s funds.” None of that is true.
Hundreds of leaked emails from Epstein’s Yahoo inbox, spanning from 2005 to 2008, contradict the Wexner Foundation report. Inside the Wexners’ family financial office in Ohio, staff treated Epstein as de facto chief financial officer, where major decisions about taxes, lines of credit, eight-figure funds transfers, and politically sensitive grants were routed through Epstein’s lawyer, and required Epstein’s approval.
The new email cache was vetted and published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, and contains many of the same forensic signatures as the dataset reported by Bloomberg earlier this year. Officials from the Wexner Foundation, the law office that conducted the review, and Epstein’s former legal counsel did not respond to requests for comment.
The emails show that Darren Indyke,…
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