The pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein was connected to the “highest levels” of US and Israeli intelligence, JD Vance said on Monday.

“He clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels of American intelligence,” the US vice president told podcaster Joe Rogan, in relation to Epstein. “He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.”

Told by Rogan that “most people think he was Mossad”, Israel's external intelligence agency, Vance replied: “Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or some other country… or both.”

The vice president, who describes himself as “an OG Epstein conspiracy theorist”, said that Epstein’s connections were to “elements of the Israeli deep state that were left of centre”, most notably former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

“It wasn’t like he was super connected to the right of centre of Israeli politics,” Vance said, Middle East Eye reported.

There has been much speculation about whether Epstein was working for Israeli, US or even Russian intelligence.

The convicted sex offender, who hosted a large number of rich and powerful people on his private island and was connected to former US President Bill Clinton, pro-Israel billionaire Les Wexner, British politician Peter Mandelson and Queen Elizabeth’s son Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, appeared to have accumulated a vast amount of compromising information over many years.

Asked earlier this year whether they considered Epstein to have been a Mossad asset, an adviser to the Indian government told Middle East Eye: “100 percent”.

There is, though, no categorical proof that Epstein worked actively for an intelligence agency.

The Epstein files do, however, document the financier’s funding of Israeli groups, including Friends of the Israel Defense (Occupation) Forces, and the settler organisation the Jewish National Fund, as well as his ties to members of Israel’s overseas intelligence services.

An FBI memo produced by the bureau’s Los Angeles field office in October 2020 reported that one of its sources had come to believe Epstein “was a co-opted Mossad agent”.

According to the document, the disgraced pedophile was described as having been “trained as a spy” for Israel’s intelligence service.