Email chatter between current US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack and Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier thought to have run an extensive international trafficking ring that secured minors for sex abuse, is included in a trove of correspondence released this week by the US Congress.

Epstein told Lebanese-American Barrack to “make me smile” with pictures of him and a “child”, one email, written in March 2016, shows.

“Send photos of you and child.. – make me smile,” Epstein, the disgraced late financier, wrote to Barrack on March 9, 2016.

Epstein then responded to an email from Barrack, writing: “Photos look good.”

There is no information on what "child" Epstein was referring to and what photos were sent by Barrack, nowadays a 78-year-old billionaire real estate investor who also serves as US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Syria.

Wyden’s Turkey link

The email story has been picked up by some Turkish publications, but Turkey in general is not showing much interest in the Epstein scandal – and that’s despite the fact that in July, Ron Wyden, a Democratic Party US Senator, made an intervention that suggested a Turkey link.

Wyden said during a session of the Senate Finance Committee: “Somewhere in the Treasury Department, locked away in a cabinet drawer, is a big Epstein file that’s full of actionable information.”

“Last year, the Biden administration allowed Finance Committee investigators to look at portions of the file in person over at the Treasury building. Here is some of what it says.”

In describing some of the contents, he said: “A lot of the women and girls he [Epstein] targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan.”

Turkey's government has so far kept its head in the sand over the matter.

Barrack behind the scenes

At the time of the Epstein-Barrack email correspondence, Trump was involved in his presidential race with Hillary Clinton, while Barrack, a friend, was working behind the scenes to help introduce the future US president to senior UAE officials.

Trump maintains that he ended relations with Epstein around three to four years before Epstein in 2008 was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution, but the Barrack-Epstein emails are one example of how Epstein was in close contact with key advisors of the future US president years later. 

Epstein wrote in another email to Barrack: “fyi I receive many calls a week about both Donald (L I, beauty contest. mara lago etc) and Clinton from reporters,” he said, adding: “Less so recently with Clinton, but my answers are always I have nothing to say.”

The reference to “Clinton” appears to refer to former US president Bill Clinton, who, like Trump and the ex-Prince Andrew of the UK, also remains under scrutiny about his past relations with Epstein, found dead in his New York jail cell in 2019 (the cause of death was officially classified as suicide), where he was held as he awaited trial after being charged with the sex trafficking of children.

The newly released emails were brought into public view after a move by Democrats on the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee.