Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh says he and a “well-informed international source” had a “distressing discussion” about a trove of Jeffrey Epstein-related files that are currently being withheld by the Justice Department. Hersh wrote on his Substack Thursday that release of the material “could cause problems for the past and present members of some in the Trump administration.”

Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his coverage of the My Lai massacre and later exposed the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. His latest post, like much of his recent work, rests on a single unnamed source, and its claims about the withheld files have not been independently verified.

“I have been told that specific evidence about Epstein’s connections to foreign and domestic intelligence services, particularly [the Israeli intelligence agency the] Mossad and the FBI, though they do exist in government files, have yet to be the subject of materials made public by the Trump administration’s Justice Department and have not come under scrutiny by the Congress and the media,” he wrote.

“I had a distressing discussion of the Epstein affair with a well-informed international source I’ve known for a long time. He suddenly volunteered last fall to talk about what he knew about Epstein.”

The article comes amid allegations that Epstein worked on behalf of several foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia and Israel. Last month, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) launched a House Judiciary Committee probe into the matter.

The allegations keep alive questions that have surrounded the case since Epstein, a financier who cultivated ties with political and business elites for decades, died in August 2019 in a Manhattan federal jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. The New York City medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

On Epstein’s ties to Israel, leaked emails reported by Drop Site News, an investigative outlet founded in 2025 by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, said the disgraced financier had deep links to the Israeli government. Those emails said Epstein helped broker a defense agreement between Israel and the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, established a backchannel for Israel-Russia communications during the Syrian civil war, and helped broker a security cooperation agreement between Israel and Mongolia.

There is also evidence that Epstein’s New York City home was fitted with “surveillance cameras,” according to a 2019 FBI email documenting the agency’s raid on the townhouse shortly after Epstein’s death. Hersh said a Mossad agent may have helped install the cameras and was later “caught” by the FBI.

“He was explicitly told to purchase off-the-shelf camera equipment in New York for the risky mission, but, as he sadly related to his friends, he didn’t follow those instructions and instead relied on the high-end equipment on which he had trained for Mossad,” Hersh wrote.

“The young Israeli told his boyhood friends that his operation had been compromised and the FBI caught him and immediately realized — given his nationality and the use of expensive Israeli gear — that Israel was aware of Epstein’s client list and its obvious blackmail and extortion potential in the world of international trade and intelligence collection.”

Hersh’s claims sit at odds with the Justice Department’s own account of its Epstein files. In February, the department released what Attorney General Pam Bondi called the first phase of the files, handing binders of documents to selected commentators at the White House, much of which repeated material already public. In July, the DOJ and FBI issued a memo concluding that Epstein kept no “client list” and ran no blackmail operation — findings that critics of the department’s handling of the case have questioned. Hersh’s post asserts that evidence of Epstein’s intelligence ties and blackmail potential exists in government files that remain unreleased.

The Substack post included a link to Hersh’s article, and the story also cited reporting from Drop Site News, a House Judiciary Committee press release from Raskin’s office, and a Justice Department file related to Epstein.