Let’s say you’re a middle-aged accountant who has spent your career working for one very rich, globally connected man. It’s high summer and you’re in the Hamptons when you get word that Number One Client – your only client – has been arrested by the feds. You may or may not have an idea why. You know a lot about Number One Client. You know where his money is, how his hundreds of millions are structured. He pays you handsomely for it. You also pay his bills, including wires totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to girls. You might even know, as the President of the United States has said, that Number One Client likes girls “on the young side.”
He’s been in trouble before, and authorities never bothered with you. But now, not only is he in jail, federal agents have broken down the baronial door of his Upper East Side mansion and are pawing through everything – the sex toys, the massage tables, the taxidermied dogs… and the safe.
Cutting through it with a diamond-tipped saw took the good part of a night. Inside: 48 loose diamonds, envelopes of cash totaling $70,000, multiple hard drives, binders of CDs, and various passports (Israeli, Austrian, and American – all with Epstein’s photo, but not his name).
Suspicious!
But their warrant – narrowly focused on sex crimes from 2002-2005 – doesn’t allow the feds to seize that stuff on the spot. They could cart off CDs found elsewhere labeled in ways related to their quest, like, for example, “Misc. Girls Nude/Dinner—Scientists.” But they need another warrant for the passports, cash, and unlabeled CDs.
They leave.
You have a choice: Stay at the beach? Go back to the city?
No rush!
With the boss in jail as of July 2019, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime accountant Richard Kahn really was in no hurry to get back to the city. He says he left it to the house manager to decide how to handle the feds and their quest.
Incredibly, in the two official federal investigations into Epstein, no one seems to have bothered to interrogate Kahn about anything – let alone this episode – until the House Oversight Committee called him in last month.
Kahn told them that “I received a call from Merwin [Dela Cruz, the house manager] … telling me that ‘I packed up two bags of Epstein’s belongings or things that were safe, and I left them with your doorman in New York City. I just wanted to let you know.’ I said to him, ‘I’m not home. I’ll be home in three or four days. And, you know, at that time, I’ll bring it up to my apartment.’” Kahn says he moseyed back to Manhattan, found the suitcases with his doorman, and brought them up. “I never touched them. I never opened them. I left them in my dining room.”
Well, the house manager told a very different story. When the FBI returned to the mansion with a warrant for the safe’s contents, they found it empty. According to the FBI’s handwritten notes, Dela Cruz said that Kahn, who he described as “the money guy,” had instructed him to pack the contents of the safe into two suitcases and deliver them directly to his – Kahn’s – apartment dining room on Sunday, his day off.
The FBI called Kahn to get the suitcases out of his apartment and into their hands. Kahn added his lawyer to the call. He claims he was back in his office that day and had returned the “never touched” suitcases to the mansion within 20 or 30 minutes of hearing that the FBI wanted them.
The New York FBI did eventually get their hands on some of the materials from the safe. But even then, the logging of them was weirdly delayed, by at least a month in some cases, according to the records. Released DOJ records indicate that the FBI’s logged contents included unlabeled hard drives and approximately eight binders containing CDs of photos, in addition to the cash, diamonds, and passports.
But a property receipt from the initial FBI search indicates that the only items seized from the safe at the time were two black binders of CDs and 13 loose CDs. Special Agent Kelly Maguire, the leader of the team that searched the house, testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial that agents did not have the legal authority to seize other CDs at that time.
So where did they go? What else of interest might have been on disks stored in a safe alongside loose diamonds and fake passports?
Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, wrote in his book Holding the Line that the FBI also discovered an Israeli passport inside the safe. We have not found any trace of that passport in the files released by the DOJ.
Michael Wolff has claimed that Epstein kept “a dozen or so” compromising photos of Trump in his safe, and would occasionally take them out to show Wolff and other friends. There is no record of those photos in the DOJ files released so far.
Special Agent Maguire did speak with Richard Kahn on the phone before the suitcases were returned. According to the call’s FD-302 interview form, Kahn was careful to add his attorney, who advised that Kahn had not opened or tampered with the contents of the suitcases and would return them to Epstein’s house in 20-30 minutes, which he reportedly did.
The FBI took the suitcases, gave Kahn a property receipt, and moved them to a secure location at the FBI New York Operations Center.
After Kahn handed over the suitcases, the record reveals more errors, inconsistencies, delays, and general weirdness in the FBI’s handling of the evidence from the safe and their reporting of these events. A “book of CDs” appeared in one inventory of the suitcases on July 11, only to be flagged as an erroneous entry in an “amended inventory” 20 days later.
FBI photographs of the suitcases taken on July 11, 2019 include two black images that are not redactions. Documentation pertaining to Kahn appears to have been entered with significant delays compared to other similar reports. A 302 report and inventory of the suitcases from Kahn were drafted on July 17, 2019, but not entered until over a month later on August 20 – ten days after Epstein’s death.
Kahn’s sworn testimony regarding the safe’s contents and the suitcases directly contradicts an FBI Task Force Officer’s sworn affidavit filed by SDNY in applications for subsequent search warrants (which only include the house manager’s version of events).
A cover-up?
Much like COURIER national correspondent Camaron Stevenson’s reporting on Kahn’s partner in Epstein-world, lawyer Darren Indyke, we find Kahn’s testimony to the Oversight Committee to be seriously undermined by the DOJ’s own files.
At the very least, we know the FBI’s handling of the safe materials and Richard Kahn’s interim possession of them destroyed a clean chain of evidence from the get-go.
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
