The Epstein leaks have reopened a door many in Washington hoped would remain sealed. Not the door of gossip - though the media is content to drown the public in that - but the door that leads into the machinery of American power.

These leaks do not merely reveal the fall of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They expose an unholy triangle of money, politics and sex, whose central thread leads to a foreign influence network that has learned to govern the world’s most powerful nation through seduction, dependence and capture.

His network was not accidental. His closest confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, long reported to have worked closely with Israeli intelligence. His investments flowed into ventures led by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister who visited him repeatedly, even after Epstein’s conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. Barak headed Carbyne, an Israeli security tech firm in which Epstein quietly placed funds.

The leaks also lay bare something even darker: the mindset of the American elites who moved through Epstein’s world. The schedules and emails reveal men who treated him not as a danger, nor even a pariah - but as a peer, a gatekeeper, a magnet.

They sought him out, from Texas boardrooms to Emirati palaces, because he stood at the crossroads of wealth, intelligence and elite indulgence. To be noticed by him was to be noticed by the network behind him. To please him was to be invited into a world where consequences evaporated.

Epstein became the public face of a quiet, sprawling intelligence octopus. Elites did not stumble into his orbit by accident; they pursued it. They recognised that he could offer what even the presidency could not: immunity, access, indulgence, and the patronage of a foreign lobby that had perfected the art of capturing nations by feeding the appetites of their rulers.