The Dinner Party: How Epstein Sat a Former Israeli PM, a Far-Right Strategist, and a Left-Wing Icon at the Same Table

On May 7, 2018, an email landed in the inbox of Valeria Chomsky, wife of Noam Chomsky. The sender was Lesley Groff, Jeffrey Epstein's longtime personal assistant. The tone was light, the language familiar. "Jeffrey says he would love to see you both on Friday!" Groff wrote. "Just let me know what time is good...he would also like to extend an invitation to dinner on Saturday May 12th."

Then she named the other guests: "Steve Bannon and Ehud Barak will be here."

That single sentence contains an extraordinary collision of worlds. Barak: former prime minister of Israel, the most decorated soldier in the country's history. Bannon: architect of Donald Trump's 2016 victory, chief White House strategist until his ouster nine months earlier, and the face of a rising global nationalist movement. Chomsky: the 89-year-old MIT linguist widely regarded as the most important public intellectual of the American left.

All three were being invited to dine at 9 East 71st Street, the 40-room Manhattan townhouse of a registered Level 3 sex offender who had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor.

The email is cataloged as EFTA00473701. It is one of millions of records released through the Epstein-related EFTA litigation. By itself, it is a dinner invitation. Read alongside dozens of other documents from the same period, it becomes a window into how Epstein operated in the final year before his arrest: not as a social host, but as a broker connecting people who needed each other but could never have met on their own.

The Calendar Tells the Story

A separate scheduling email from the same week, EFTA00473532, dated May 2, 2018, maps out Epstein's plans in detail. Monday May 7: "12:30pm Lunch w/Ehud." Friday May 11: "TBD Noam Chomsky." The dinner invitation sent later that same day proposed Saturday May 12 as the date for all three guests to convene.

This was not an impromptu gathering. Epstein's week was structured around sequential meetings with each guest individually before bringing them together. Barak was on the calendar for lunch on Monday. Chomsky for a Friday visit. The Saturday dinner was the culmination, the point at which the separate threads would be woven into a single conversation.

The calendar also shows Epstein managing a complex travel schedule during that same week, with flights between New York, Miami, and St. Thomas via JetBlue and American Airlines, along with appointments with Tom Pritzker, the billionaire Hyatt heir. The dinner party was one node in a dense web of high-level meetings.

Barak and Bannon Had Already Met

The proposed dinner was not the first time Barak and Bannon would have been in the same room through Epstein's orchestration. Seven weeks earlier, on March 23, 2018, Epstein sent Barak a pointed two-line email: "nice, what did you think of Bannon." The document is EFTA00852997.

The phrasing is significant. Epstein did not ask whether Barak had met Bannon. He asked what Barak thought of him. This was a follow-up, not an introduction. The two men had already sat together, and Epstein was collecting feedback. The email reads like a handler debriefing an asset after a first contact.

That same email thread contains EFTA00852946, which shows Barak corresponding with James Brocklebank of Advent International, a Boston-based private equity firm managing over $80 billion. Brocklebank thanks Barak for "taking the time to meet Kevin in New York yesterday" and proposes a follow-up call about "one of the payments businesses in Israel." Barak replies that his secretary Moran can "coordinate a telco early next week while I'm in NYC, or later next week when I'm in LA."

Epstein had arranged the Advent introduction. So in a single day, March 23, 2018, the email record shows Epstein performing two distinct brokering functions for Barak: connecting him to a major private equity player, and separately gauging how his meeting with Trump's former chief strategist had gone. Barak needed American financial and political networks. Epstein provided both.

The Bannon-Epstein Relationship: An Active Channel

Bannon's connection to Epstein was not a passing acquaintance. The EFTA documents reveal an active, casual communication channel that persisted for months after the proposed dinner.

On June 10, 2018, Bannon emailed Epstein a Breitbart article about Erdogan predicting "War Between the Cross and Crescent" over Austria's mosque closures (EFTA02642352). On July 7, 2018, Bannon sent Epstein a Dutch television interview he had given on the program Nieuwsuur, asking "You think it works???" Epstein replied: "brutal!" (EFTA02643125).

On July 23, 2018, Epstein emailed Bannon: "available now?" after a back-and-forth about an unspecified topic where Epstein wrote, "We can talk about at your convenience" (d-25404). On August 8, 2018, the two exchanged a Reuters article about China defending its Iran business ties in the face of Trump sanctions (d-22729).

These were not stiff, formal exchanges. Bannon was sharing his media appearances with Epstein for feedback. Epstein was sending Bannon geopolitical articles and requesting phone calls. The rhythm of the correspondence suggests two people who spoke regularly and considered each other part of their strategic orbit.

Epstein's interest in Bannon appears to have begun no later than November 2016. Days after the presidential election, Epstein's associate Alain Forget forwarded him an article about Bannon's 2014 Vatican speech, in which Bannon declared a "global tea party movement" and praised European far-right parties. The email was marked "Importance: High" (d-17663). When Bannon was ousted from the White House in August 2017, Epstein's associate Richard Kahn immediately forwarded him the New York Post headline: "Steve Bannon ousted from White House" (EFTA02639630).

Epstein was tracking Bannon's rise and fall in real time.

Chomsky: The Financial Thread

Chomsky's relationship with Epstein has a documentary trail stretching back at least to 2012. In March of that year, Lesley Groff emailed physicist Lawrence Krauss asking if he could help set up a meeting with Chomsky during an upcoming trip to Harvard. "Jeffrey is asking if you could help," Groff wrote. The visit would include Leon Black of Apollo Management and Austin Hearst, the publishing heir. Krauss wrote back: "I have written Noam" (EFTA02172393).

Krauss then brokered the introduction, emailing Chomsky directly. Chomsky responded: "Just suggest to him to write to me. It's a Sunday, I think, so it won't be when I'm at work." Krauss reported back triumphantly: "You are in.. he will meet with you.. you of course owe me big time now" (EFTA02172504).

By December 2015, Epstein treated Chomsky's physical presence at his home as a social asset. In an email to Groff about an unrelated matter, Epstein wrote casually: "Do you know Chomsky, he is with me" (EFTA00334030). The linguist was apparently visiting 9 East 71st Street as a matter of routine.

The financial dimensions of the relationship are documented in bank records. A check dated March 2, 2017, drawn on "Gratitude America, Ltd." at Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, was made payable to "Noam Chomsky" for $20,000 (EFTA01348702). Gratitude America was one of Epstein's shell entities. A separate email from February 28, 2017, shows Valeria Chomsky writing to Epstein's associate Richard Kahn: "If you could please send a check to our address would be ideal" (EFTA00446865).

By July 2017, Epstein was emailing Valeria Chomsky directly about visiting the couple in Tucson and pressing that "the trust accounting is really important" (EFTA02642876). By May 31, 2018, just weeks after the dinner invitation, Valeria emailed Epstein about "the required distribution from the IRA," noting it was $300,000 but "had changed for less because of my age" (EFTA01047486).

When the New York Times reported in 2023 that Chomsky had visited Epstein multiple times, the linguist said he went for "financial advice." The EFTA documents suggest the relationship was more extensive than that phrase conveys. Epstein was not merely advising Chomsky. His shell company was writing checks to Chomsky. He was involved in the Chomskys' trust accounting and IRA distributions. He was hosting Chomsky at his home and presenting him to other guests as a trophy. Whatever the nature of the financial arrangement, it was deep enough that Chomsky, at 89, was still taking calls and accepting dinner invitations from a convicted sex offender.

The Timing Problem

The proposed May 12, 2018, dinner fell at a specific and damning moment in the Epstein timeline.

In November 2018, six months after the dinner invitation, the Miami Herald would publish Julie K. Brown's "Perversion of Justice" series, the investigative project that blew open the 2008 plea deal and reignited federal interest in Epstein. But Brown had been reporting the story for months before publication. Her work was known in legal and media circles by spring 2018. Epstein was aware that scrutiny was building.

He had pleaded guilty in 2008 to a single charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor. He served 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail under a work-release agreement that allowed him to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week, at his office. He registered as a sex offender. The facts of his conviction were public.

And yet, a decade later, he could still fill a dinner table at his Manhattan townhouse with a former head of state, a former White House strategist, and one of the world's most famous intellectuals. The conviction had not diminished his convening power. If anything, the documents suggest his network was as active in 2018 as it had ever been.

What the Dinner Reveals About the Network

The EFTA documents do not establish that anyone at the proposed dinner did anything illegal. They do not prove that Barak, Bannon, or Chomsky knew about or participated in Epstein's crimes. Whether Chomsky actually attended the May 12 dinner remains unconfirmed.

What the documents prove is structural. They show how Epstein created value for powerful people by connecting them to other powerful people across political, geographic, and ideological lines that would normally be impassable. A former Israeli prime minister needed access to American private equity and political operatives. A populist strategist building an international movement needed foreign leaders. A linguist and his wife needed financial management. Epstein sat at the intersection of all these needs, facilitating introductions, hosting meals, writing checks, and following up with breezy one-liners like "what did you think of Bannon."

This model of influence did not require Epstein to hold formal power. He held something more liquid: the ability to place the right people in the same room at the right time. The dinner invitation of May 12, 2018, is a snapshot of that ability at work. It is a picture of a convicted sex offender arranging a gathering so improbable that it reads like fiction, with guests so prominent that each one, on their own, would be a headline.

Fourteen months after the invitation was sent, Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport on federal sex trafficking charges. The guests who had been breaking bread at 9 East 71st Street were left to explain why they had been there at all.

The email from Lesley Groff is still in the record. The guest list was Bannon and Barak. The address was Epstein's home. The date was May 12, 2018. The question the documents force is not what happened at dinner. It is why a man with Epstein's record still had the power to send the invitation.