It’s almost conventional wisdom in certain quarters that Jeffrey Epstein must have been working for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.

“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy,” Tucker Carlson said of Epstein the other day, “had direct connections to a foreign government. No one is allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty.”

Steve Bannon, covering all his bases, says Epstein was working for Mossad, MI6, Saudi intelligence and the CIA, while Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA only says that Epstein may have been working for Mossad.

The first question to ask about this purported relationship is, Why would Mossad want to associate itself with Epstein? He was under investigation for his sexual crimes going back to 2005 and convicted of a few of them (as part of a sweetheart plea deal) in 2008, and would be under federal investigation again about a decade later.

Clearly, it would risk an enormous black eye for the State of Israel to connect itself to a known sex offender whose lifestyle was flamboyant and an ongoing crime scene.

What would be the supposed upside? Compromising information on the rich and powerful? Presumably there’d be much easier ways to honey-trap men with untoward sexual appetites than hope they become friendly with Jeffrey Epstein and compromise themselves on his private island.

If the notion of Epstein as Israeli spy seems implausible, if not farcical, it’s gotten some superficial plausibility from parts of the record that have been exaggerated or misinterpreted.

Perhaps most important, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida who worked out the plea deal with Epstein, Alex Acosta, supposedly said that he was told to go easy on Epstein by higher-ups in the Bush administration at the time because Epstein was with intelligence. Acosta allegedly said this as part of his vetting process to become Trump’s first secretary of labor in the first term.

But this didn’t come directly from Acosta, rather an unnamed source told the story to a reporter. Acosta denies he ever said it. Asked about the matter at a press conference as labor secretary when the Epstein story reemerged, Acosta seemed to deny it, although, admittedly, in a halting and indirect fashion.

As part of an extensive 2020 Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report into the handling of the case by Acosta and the Southern District, Acosta told the investigators that he had no information about Epstein being an intelligence asset and that his answer at the press conference was meant to be a “no.”

The report related that “OPR found no evidence suggesting that Epstein was such a cooperating witness or ‘intelligence asset,’ or that anyone — including any of the subjects of OPR’s investigation — believed that to be the case.”

What about Epstein’s well-documented relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak? One assumes that a Mossad asset wouldn’t spend inordinate time with a former high-ranking Israeli official.

Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein, maintains that he asked his client if he had contacts with intelligence agencies, and Epstein said “no,” even though it would have been in his legal interest to disclose any relationships.

Regarding Epstein’s death, which many believe was really a murder, the Mossad accusations get more fantastic: Israeli intelligence had to clean up after itself by killing an American citizen on U.S. soil — in fact, while he was held in a U.S. jail?

By the way, if Mossad killed Epstein, and was capable of pulling off a no-fingerprints operation in extremely difficult circumstances on U.S. soil, surely they would have killed his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell before she went to trial with an incentive to spill her guts.

All of this so beggars belief that it’s almost not worth addressing, except that influential voices on the right believe Israel might be behind one of the most hideous scandals in recent American life.