With the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. There’s so much interesting and scandalous stuff in the tranche of more than 20,000 emails released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week that you can find yourself thinking: “Wait, why does this all matter again?”

Most obviously, it’s about the disgraceful personal conduct of the president himself. There’s no doubt that Donald Trump and his most fanatical supporters will find some tortured way to lie to themselves about this latest damning evidence of his Epstein ties, just like they did with the weird and creepy letter he wrote Epstein for his fiftieth birthday, or with his administration’s Orwellian about-face on releasing what they had on the notorious sex offender.

But for anyone still tethered to reality, Epstein’s statements that Trump “knew about the girls” or asking a New York Times reporter if he wanted “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen” will be further confirmation of what has been a matter of public record for decades: that Trump and Epstein were very close friends for years, and that Trump was, at minimum, fully aware of what the billionaire pedophile was up to.

But there’s also a much bigger story here, revolving around Epstein’s collection of damaging information on influential people, his possible intelligence ties, and Israel’s meddling in internal US politics.

It is bad enough that the president of the United States hung out with one of history’s most prolific child sex abusers and happily turned a blind eye to his crimes, if not worse. It’s a whole other thing if that association was being used by a foreign government to amass political leverage and influence US policy.

Let’s cycle through what we know. First, Epstein has long been accused of videotaping or otherwise recording the famous and powerful men that he farmed girls out to. One accuser has said that all of his homes had secret cameras installed to spy on and record what was going on in the bedrooms and bathrooms.

Peabody Award–winning, twenty-four-year-long CBS producer Ira Rosen claimed that Epstein’s coconspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, told him point-blank Epstein had videotapes of both Bill Clinton and Trump. Among the evidence seized from Epstein’s properties are stacks of binders full of CDs labeled with the names of people we are not allowed to know.

Second, Epstein has long been rumored to have been an intelligence asset, specifically for Israel. Epstein was meant to have come into the employ of Israel as early as the 1980s after working as an arms dealer, sources told journalist Vicky Ward a few years back, and the discovery of a false passport and cash in his safe seemed to lend further credence to this.

More recently, Drop Site has done the best reporting on this front, running a series of stories based on a tranche of leaked emails of former Israeli prime minister (and Epstein associate) Ehud Barak that show Epstein’s work for the Israeli government. That included: repeatedly hosting an Israeli military intelligence officer and Barak aide who was in the United States to conduct official business; working with Barak to secure actions against Israeli adversaries, whether a US bombing of Iran or Russian backing for regime change in Syria; or brokering security agreements between Israel and Mongolia and Côte d’Ivoire.

As these stories pile up, it has become increasingly difficult to deny that Epstein was, at minimum, an asset for Israeli intelligence.

Third, we know that Epstein used damaging information on powerful people as currency. This latest email release, for instance, shows Epstein and author Michael Wolff discussing how the billionaire pedophile could best leverage what he knew about Trump to benefit himself, as his former friend ran for the GOP nomination. Various emails show Epstein trading information about Trump to world leaders. Two years ago, Bill Gates’s own spokeswoman revealed Epstein had tried to use his knowledge of the Microsoft founder’s affair to threaten him.

Fourth, we know that this is exactly how Israeli intelligence and the Israeli state in general operate. US officials have complained for decades about the aggressive spying that Israel carries out against them and the United States as a whole to meddle in US politics, spying that has at times involved bugging hotel rooms and plying visiting officials with drugs and women. Israel does the same thing with Palestinians, spying on them and blackmailing them with information about their sexual behavior to turn them into informants.

Most shockingly, a former editor for the conservative Weekly Standard reported that then and future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu once obliquely threatened Clinton with tapes of his embarrassing conversations with Monica Lewinsky in order to get him to release a man then serving prison time for selling US military secrets to Israel. That bombshell claim was corroborated by several facts: that Lewinsky testified that Clinton had told her “he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones”; that he told her this shortly after Clinton met with Netanyahu at the Oval Office; and contemporary reporting about the “heated exchanges” and “tense discussions” between the two that nearly derailed the signing of the Oslo Accords, after a revolt from the national security establishment led Clinton to reverse course on pardoning the spy.

It’s at this point you start to think about the often embarrassing servility Trump has shown to Netanyahu and Israel over the past year, coming into office on an “America First” platform and the image of a bulldozing strongman and then, once in office, continually selling out that platform for the benefit of Israel and meekly letting Netanyahu walk all over him.

Of course, you do not need the specter of blackmail to explain US lawmakers’ bizarre fealty to Israel, especially in an increasingly nakedly corrupt campaign finance system. But as more and more of this information piles up, it does make you wonder if Netanyahu has pulled something similar today to what he reportedly did with Clinton all those years ago — or if he even has to, given the potential for something damaging to have made its way from Epstein to the Israeli government, and given the president’s palpable anxiety over the public learning more about his friendship with the late pedophile.

In many ways, the problem here isn’t even Trump. It’s the fact that the US political establishment has, for years, given a foreign government carte blanche to meddle in its affairs and created a corrupt, money-dominated system that’s given Israel and other unseemly states the perfect conditions to exploit and take advantage of US power. In this case, it might be Epstein and the way he used his extreme wealth to draw influential and powerful people into his web. But if nothing changes, it basically guarantees some version of this meddling and covert influence will keep happening over and over, even with Epstein dead and Trump eventually long gone from political life.