Extract from Jack Poulson Substack in September 2025
Exclusive: How private intelligence brought the U.S. treasury secretary into contact with Epstein’s corporate web
Leaked emails from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak document how his ‘Cogito/Ergo/Sum’ trio of companies wove together a Manhattan PI firm, Soros Fund, Scott Bessent, and Jeffrey Epstein.
The investor Scott Bessent during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the year before he became President Trump’s second-term treasury secretary. Credit: The photographer M. Scott Brower by way of Instagram.
Updated September 30, 2025
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“Mr. Prime Minister, There is perhaps only one firm I think is a sham, and your [Ivory Coast] hosts have found them,” wrote R.P. Eddy, the dapper chief executive of the Manhattan-based private intelligence firm Ergo and former chief of staff to the legendary U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, according to a leaked archive of emails with former Israeli prime minister and intelligence chief Ehud Barak. Originally published by the hacktivist group ‘Handala’, the emails have received widespread attention since their August 27 curation by the American transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets.
It was August 4, 2013 and Barak had just flown to Abidjan to meet with Ivory Coast president Alassane Ouattara as part of an ultimately unsuccessful pitch for a large contract to support the country’s intelligence apparatus – with a similar trip to Nigeria planned soon after – and had heard that the government was working with Ergo’s older, D.C.-based competitor, Jefferson Waterman International (JWI).
“Their [JWI’s] guy who claims to be a serious intel expert makes up his entire background, transforming himself from a mid-level analyst into James Bond + a delta force soldier,” continued Eddy’s apparent response to Barak’s inquiry about the company. While not named in the email, JWI’s paramilitary and clandestine operations expert at the time was Enrique Prado, an infamous Cuban former CIA paramilitary officer and chief of station in Khartoum who had left the agency for the controversial private military contractor Blackwater in 2004 in an attempt to privatize his idea for a post-9/11 assassination squad.
A previously unreported trio of Israeli companies, designed around the Latin phrase “Cogito, ergo sum,” formed the backbone of a corporate tax scheme whose central component, Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd., served as the face of many of Barak’s business relationships. According to Barak’s leaked email archive, current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was a significant client of Barak’s, both indirectly through the Manhattan-based private intelligence firm Ergo, and then later through Barak’s Israeli Ergo. Bessent was at the time chief investment officer for the hedge fund of the prominent Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.
Barak simultaneously leveraged the legal entity used to engage with Bessent’s team to form Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, an Israel-based limited partnership between his Israeli Ergo and the now-deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s U.S. Virgin Islands-based Southern Trust Company, Inc. Despite any apparent direct relationship between Bessent and Epstein, the uncomfortably close business dealings could help explain the new treasury secretary’s refusal to provide the U.S. Senate Finance Committee with financial records relating to Epstein. Ranking member Ron Wyden (D-OR) recently characterized Bessent as “a willing participant in the Trump administration’s Epstein cover-up.”
Jeffrey Epstein was Ehud Barak’s business partner as late as 2015
Former PM’s connection to financier accused of sex-trafficking minors becomes an issue ahead of national elections in September
By ToI Staff and JTA11 Jul 2019, 9:40 pmUpdated at 1:24 am
Former prime minister Ehud Barak announces the formation of a new party at Tel Aviv’s Beit Sokolov on June 26, 2019. (Flash90)
American financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender now embroiled in a sex-trafficking case involving minors, was an active business partner with former prime minister Ehud Barak as late as 2015.
Barak formed a limited partnership company in Israel in 2015, called Sum (E.B.) 2015, to invest in a high-tech startup then called Reporty, now named Carbyne, which developed video streaming and geolocation software for emergency services. A large part of the money used by Sum to buy Reporty stock was supplied by Epstein, Haaretz reported Thursday
Scott Bessent Connection to George Soros Explained as Trump Mulls Cabinet
Published
Nov 12, 2024 at 01:54 PM EST
updated
Nov 22, 2024 at 07:10 PM EST
Scott Bessent speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C.,…Read More | Photo by Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images/(Photo by Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/M
Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager once involved in George Soros‘s investment operations, has recently emerged as a potential pick for Treasury secretary in a second Trump administration.
Having spent decades working alongside Soros—a prominent donor to Democratic causes—Bessent’s evolution into a key supporter of President-elect Donald Trump marks a striking political shift. Once a reliable donor to Democratic campaigns, Bessent’s contributions shifted rightward after he left Soros’s firm.
By 2016, Bessent had distanced himself from mainstream Democratic causes, contributing significantly to Republican-aligned super PACs and, ultimately, to Trump’s campaign.
Now Kait Justice on Substack refers to Jack Poulson’s investigative work and picks up from there in her Substack:
The three entities were Cogito (E.B.) 2015 Ltd, Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd, and Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, and as Poulson documented, the Sum structure was designed by Darren K. Indyke, Epstein’s longtime lawyer. Ergo produced intelligence reports that were sold to hedge fund managers as commercial products, the kind of research Wall Street pays for to get an edge on geopolitical developments.
She goes on to link the money flows:
June 23, 2014 email referenced a “co-investment arrangement with one of the world’s largest family offices” using the code name “Sterling,” a reference to Soros Fund Management named after the 1992 currency crisis where Soros made $1 billion betting against the British pound, the same crisis where Bessent made his reputation. Bessent served as Chief Investment Officer of Soros Fund managing approximately $25 billion.
In May 2015, a Soros Fund staffer emailed requesting that someone described as “working with Scott Bessent” be added to Barak’s Ergo distribution list, and Bessent’s own personal assistant coordinated calendar meetings with Barak’s wife regarding potential meetings during Barak’s New York visits.
Great, but what does any of it actually mean? Here is why the corporate structure matters: By January 2016, Epstein’s Southern Trust Company, the U.S. Virgin Islands entity he wholly owned, became a limited partner in Sum, acquiring 50% ownership. The same corporate entity that received consulting payments from Bessent’s Soros Fund Management, Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd, served as the general partner for Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, meaning Ergo controlled how Sum’s money was invested and where it went. Epstein’s money flowed into Sum, and Ergo decided what happened to it.
Epstein’s money then flowed through Sum into an Israeli emergency technology company called Carbyne, where Barak served as chairman.
I documented in my investigation last October how Epstein’s money flowed through Southern Trust into Carbyne, the Israeli emergency call platform that can remotely activate a caller’s smartphone camera, GPS, and audio, chaired by Barak with Unit 8200 veterans technology now embedded in American 911 systems. The man who oversaw the fund that was a client of Ergo is now the Secretary of the Treasury, which means he controls the financial records that could map the full pipeline, he chairs the regulatory body reviewing the EA deal (we’ll get into that), and he runs the agency where banks are supposed to report suspicious transactions.
In the Barak leaked files, I found an Ergo intelligence report dated July 2, 2014, just weeks after Bessent was named as a client.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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