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

Former prime minister Ehud Barak sits down with Channel 12 news for an extensive interview in which he is pressed on his ties with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in the period after Epstein’s initial sex crimes conviction and before the broader 2019 probe against him was opened.

Barak says 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 adds.

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

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

Asked about an image of him entering Epstein’s home in Manhattan with his face partially covered by a neck warmer in 2016, Barak notes 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.

BREAKING:

⚡EPSTEIN'S LIST:

???????? 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 him and his wife staying many times in an apartment owned by Epstein between 2015 and 2019, Barak says 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 notes that he was not prime minister at the time.

The former prime minister is 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.

The former prime minister says they were an “unsuccessful choice of words, with associations to unreasonable stereotypes,” but then tells viewers to ask themselves if they don’t speak like that in private matters.

Barak is pressed by the interviewer about his alleged racist comments in the conversation related to Russian immigration to Israel in general.

In the recordings, he 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.

Barak says 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 hits 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 says. “There is no racism there,” he says, adding, “I am describing a fact.”

As the interviewer stresses that he believes Barak’s comments were racist to Mizrahi Jewish migrants, Barak heatedly denies this and argues that at its founding, the country had to “rescue” all Jewish people, no matter what.

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