Ehud Barak: I regret ever meeting Epstein, should have used ‘more thorough judgment’

Former prime minister Ehud Barak said he regretted maintaining a close relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after his initial sex crimes conviction and before the broader 2019 probe against him was opened, and denied he ever took part in illicit activities, in a lengthy interview aired on Thursday evening.

Speaking to Channel 12 news, Barak was pressed on revelations that he stayed at an apartment owned by Epstein multiple times on trips to the United States, and a recording released in the so-called Epstein Files last week in which he is heard making allegedly sexist and racist comments while expressing an idea to offset Arab population growth with Russian immigrants.

Barak said that he is responsible for all of his own actions, “and there is definitely room to ask if I should have exercised more thorough judgment” and sought more information about Epstein’s behavior.

“I can certainly say that I regret the moment I met him in 2003,” he added.

“I never, in all the 15 years that I knew [Epstein], never saw any unreasonable occurrence, or any unreasonable behavior,” Barak stressed.

“I did not know that manner of his crimes until 2019, and you probably didn’t know it either,” he also noted.

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???????? Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister, as he seemingly enters and leaves Jeffery Epstein's Manhattan mansion in 2016. pic.twitter.com/ilrpz4vAM1

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) January 4, 2024

Asked about an image of him entering Epstein’s home in Manhattan with his face partially covered by a neck warmer in 2016, Barak noted that he was wrapped up against the cold and that on the same day, he was pictured leaving the same building with his face not covered, and self-evidently was not trying to hide anything.

Pressed on him and his wife staying many times in an apartment owned by Epstein between 2015 and 2019, Barak said it was useful when visiting New York because he could leave things there, and stressed the “right of every citizen” to stay at an apartment belonging to someone they know, insisting there was nothing illegal about it. He noted that he was not the prime minister at the time.

The former prime minister was also asked about remarks in a recently unclassified 2014 recording of him with Epstein in which he said, “many young, beautiful girls would come, tall and slim” from Russia to Israel. In the recording, he explained to the disgraced financier that he had told President Vladimir Putin that Russian immigration could offset Arab population growth.

The former prime minister said he had used an “unsuccessful choice of words, with associations to unreasonable stereotypes,” but then told viewers to ask themselves if they didn’t speak like that in private matters.

Reminded by the interviewer that he was not just a regular person, the former prime minister insisted, “In a face-to-face conversation, people who aren’t regular also speak in a slightly different manner.”

“I’m not proud of that choice of words, but I did not say that to Putin,” he added.

In the 2014 recording, Barak suggested preferring Russian immigration, to “control the quality” of Israel’s demographics “effectively, much more than the founding fathers of Israel did,” which has been interpreted by critics as racist to North African and Middle Eastern migrants who arrived in Israel after the state’s founding.

Denying racist remarks in the conversation, Barak claimed the media created a “distorted” depiction of his comments, and that they were part of a broader discussion on the demographic challenge Israel faced with its growing Arab population.

“It’s a recording of you,” the reporter hit back.

“I raised the thought or idea, that by combining the easing of conversion processes on one hand, and the creation of the possibility of voluntary immigration to Israel, we can solve this challenge,” Barak said. “There is no racism there,” he claimed, adding, “I am describing a fact.”

When the interviewer said he regarded Barak’s comments as racist to Mizrahi Jewish migrants, Barak heatedly denied this.

His point, he argued, was that at its founding, Israel country had to “rescue” all Jewish people, no matter what.

Now that Israel is a developed country, if it wants to encourage “voluntary migration,” he went on, it would be necessary to be selective and take “better quality” people, regardless of where they are from.

Barak charged that the “poison machine” created the idea that he was being racist, using a phrase typically employed by government critics to refer to the efforts of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s media allies to shape public discourse and bring down opponents.

Barak was the prime minister in 1999-2001, and defense minister in 2007-2013, and the audio seemed to indicate he was entering the private sector at the time of the 2014 conversation.

Barak acknowledged to Channel 12 that additional materials could be publicized involving his ties with Epstein in the coming weeks.

“It is reasonable that in the coming weeks there will be all sorts of other things stemming from the same matter, from the fact that I had a business and social relationship with him for 15 years,” Barak said, but he was adamant that nothing “inappropriate” would be discovered.

The latest releases from the files, published by the US Department of Justice, are documents investigators compiled about Epstein, who has a sprawling, global network of powerful acquaintances.

Barak’s ties to Epstein have been known for years. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Barak.

Other world leaders are featured in the Epstein files, including former US president Bill Clinton, US President Donald Trump, and the UK’s former Prince Andrew.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to procuring a child for prostitution and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence.

He killed himself in prison in 2019 while facing charges of sex trafficking underage girls.