Mandelson kept working with Epstein 5 years after paedophilia conviction

Leaked emails show Blair’s right-hand man kept asking convicted child rapist and trafficker for help and advice for years

Tony Blair’s right-hand man – and ‘core‘ Keir Starmer adviser – Peter Mandelson continued to consult with disgraced billionaire and likely Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein for years after Epstein’s conviction for child sex and trafficking offences, according to leaked emails obtained by Declassified UK.

The emails show that Mandelson contacted Epstein, from his work email, in 2013 – over five years after Epstein’s initial paedophilia conviction after pleading guilty to procuring a child for prostitution – to ask for help checking the background of an Israeli political consultant, Asaf Eisin. Mandelson, a former minister under Tony Blair now a Labour peer and the UK ambassador to the US – has previously claimed to have had no “kind of professional or business relationship with Epstein in any form”. Mandelson’s 2013 email was signed as chair of his huge lobbying firm Global Counsel.

Can you ask Ehud [former Israeli PM Ehud Barak] whether he knows/thinks of this Israeli guy living in London? He says he worked on political campaigns for Ehud. Thanks. Peter.

Peter Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein, 2013.

The leaked email is part of a mass leak of Barak’s emails that has been published by a file-sharing website called Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), reportedly part of a pro-Palestine ‘hacking consortium’.

Barak, with whom Mandelson was clearly on first-name terms, has been accused of “appalling crimes against the Palestinian people“ and was Israel’s defence minister in 2010 at the time Israeli forces slaughtered ten volunteer crew members of the peaceful, humanitarian flotilla led by theTurkish vessel Mavi Marmara after boarding it in international waters.

Dozens of details of the new leak have been independently verified by the Sunday Times. The Foreign Office declined to comment but did not deny the email’s authenticity. Mandelson told a journalist to “fuck off” when asked about his relationship with Epstein – who called him “Petie” – and has claimed to “very much regret” ever being introduced to him, while denying any “professional or business relationship”.

As Declassified notes:

This is not the first time emails have been disclosed detailing the relationship between Epstein and Mandelson. Epstein sent an email to JP Morgan bankers in 2009 boasting of his friendship with Mandelson… The historian Andrew Lownie, whose recent biography of Prince Andrew exposed new details about the British establishment’s links to Epstein, told Declassified: “I’ve always felt that Peter Mandelson has questions to answer about his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein – and indeed his relationship with Prince Andrew. I can understand concerns about his appointment as British ambassador. He added: “For legal reasons, I was not able to put everything I know in my book, ‘Entitled’, but I welcome these further investigations into him.”

Read more here.

Please remember to support Skwawkbox if you can, to help ensure it can keep running. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (Skwawkbox will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount as it has to be entered by us). Alternatively, if you prefer to make a one-off or recurring donation by simple card payment, please use the form below:

Thanks for your solidarity so Skwawkbox can keep doing its job of inconveniencing the right and helping to build the left!

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so, but please include the donor information above – see here for more.