King Charles III is ready to “give support”, if requested, to the British police tasked with assessing the possible criminal relevance of the confidential information that the former Prince Andrew would have shared with Jeffrey Epstein on some missions carried out in years in which he was an emissary and commercial spokesperson on behalf of various British governments in Asia. Buckingham Palace announced this with an unprecedented note in which it recalls how Charles has already “showed deep concern”, through “unprecedented” actions, about his brother’s involvement in the scandal of links with the late American pedophile financier.
“We are very worried”, William and Kate also underlined about a case that risks overwhelming even the Starmer government. Ghislaine Maxwell, however, was called to testify in the Chamber on the Epstein case in a video link from prison behind closed doors. The ex-partner and accomplice of the financier who committed suicide in prison availed herself of the right not to respond, invoking the fifth amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to remain silent so as not to incriminate herself.
Lawyers for the former British socialite, sentenced to 20 years for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, have said she will only speak if she receives a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary Clinton are ready to testify at the end of February, but the battle is whether their testimony should be public, as the former presidential couple wants, or behind closed doors, as the Republicans would like, perhaps fearing that the interrogation could become an embarrassing boomerang for Donald Trump too.
From the new files published by the US justice system, it emerges that Maxwell helped Bill found and finance his philanthropic initiatives after the presidency, but before Epstein’s indictment in Florida in 2006. The disclosure of the documents has opened a sort of Pandora’s box, with political and judicial repercussions so far more abroad than in the US. In particular in Great Britain, where the links with Epstein of the former Prince Andrew and the former ambassador to the USA Peter Mandelson are shaking the Royal Household and the Labor government respectively. In what is their first official note on the case, Prince William and his wife Kate expressed their “deep concern” at the “continuing revelations” emerging from the files.
The short statement highlights how the thoughts of the Princes of Wales are “aimed at the victims” of the Epstein scandal. But Andrea is never mentioned, even if there is an indirect reference to the numerous embarrassments he caused, which inevitably reverberate on the commitments of the leaders of the monarchy on the international scene: from that of William arriving in Saudi Arabia to those of King Charles, who has already been repeatedly challenged during a couple of visits to his homeland. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also walking on eggshells after the resignation of Mandelson, the former controversial eminence grise of Tony Blair’s New Labour, recycled about a year ago by the prime minister himself as ambassador to the USA (despite the fact that his relationships with the pedophile fixer were already known) and ended up under accusation in a criminal investigation by Scotland Yard for his double links with Epstein.
First the chief of staff Morgan McSweeney left, now the head of communications Tim Allan. Also pressured by the leader of the Scottish branch of Labour, Anas Sarwar, who asked him to resign, Starmer decided to turn to his party’s parliamentary group to try to regain the trust of his deputies and save his seat. Earthquake tremors also occurred in Norway, where the police announced that they had opened an investigation against a famous diplomat from the country, Mona Juul, and her husband, Terje R›d-Larsen, suspected respectively of “aggravated corruption” and “complicity in aggravated corruption” in the context of their past links with Jeffrey Epstein. Juul, who has just resigned as ambassador to Jordan and Iraq, and her spouse had both played important roles in the secret Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. And while suspicions grow that Epstein worked or was targeted by intelligence agencies, from the CIA to the Mossad and the FSB, other revelations could come from today, when parliamentarians will be able to consult uncensored copies of the files.