WASHINGTON — The explosive claim buried in the Epstein files reads like a spy thriller: a confidential FBI source told federal agents that Jeffrey Epstein was a co-opted Mossad asset, that Alan Dershowitz had communicated directly with Israeli intelligence, and that Donald Trump had been “compromised by Israel.” The document circulated across Washington and international newsrooms for weeks. Then someone identified the source.
His name is Charles C. Johnson. He once interned for Alan Dershowitz in high school.
The man who accused Epstein’s most famous attorney of working for Israel’s spy agency had, as a teenager, worked for that attorney himself. Johnson, founder of the now-defunct GotNews website and permanently banned from Twitter in 2015 for soliciting funds to “take out” a Black Lives Matter activist, confirmed he was the Confidential Human Source after Semafor matched him to the document via a shared source ID number. That confirmation came while Johnson was appealing a civil verdict ordering him to pay $71 million for running a scheme in which he impersonated a U.S. government intelligence asset to defraud investors. The man who told the FBI about clandestine spy networks had, according to a federal jury, been faking to be a spy for money.
The FBI memo, released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, was dated October 18, 2020, precisely two weeks before the presidential election. Johnson told agents he had “become convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent” and that Epstein had “trained as a spy” under Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister who acknowledged having known Epstein. He accused Dershowitz of being a Mossad operative himself, told agents the Chabad Hasidic movement was “doing everything they can to co-opt the Trump presidency,” and called for an investigation into the Kushner family. The document framed all of it as the source’s suspicion, not established intelligence. The bureau’s own subsequent assessment was unambiguous: nothing Johnson said should be credited.
The civil record is equally unambiguous. A jury in the Northern District of Texas awarded $40 million in damages in 2025 for racketeering, fraud, and defamation; the verdict included RICO counts, which triggered a trebling of damages to a total judgment of approximately $71 million. DLA Piper, which represented the plaintiffs, Hal Lambert and his firm Point Bridge Capital, described Johnson’s conduct as a “multi-year campaign” of threats, extortion, and false impersonation of federal law enforcement officials.
The verdict did not settle the matter. On November 20, 2025, Johnson was jailed for contempt of court after failing to comply with post-judgment discovery requirements. During the deposition process, he stole a courthouse mug and water bottles from the premises, earning a separate $1,000 fine for theft of government property. He was released on February 5, 2026, after spending roughly two and a half months in custody. His appeal to the Fifth Circuit remains pending.
Dershowitz’s response was measured but pointed. He acknowledged Johnson had indeed been a confidential FBI source, then described him as “a discredited one.” He added the labels “fraudster” and “Holocaust denier,” the second drawing from a documented Reddit exchange in which Johnson stated he did not “and never have believed the six million figure” regarding Holocaust victims, offered 250,000 deaths as a more “realistic” estimate, and agreed with a Holocaust-denying filmmaker. Johnson has described the transcript as fabricated, then acknowledged the statements, and eventually settled on the explanation that he was testing Reddit’s approach to free speech. Separately, during this same period, Johnson raised over $150,000 in crowdfunded contributions for neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s legal defense.
The Dershowitz internship occupies its own peculiar position in this history. Johnson worked for Dershowitz while still in high school. The attorney whose name he later placed in FBI files as an Israeli intelligence operative had been, at one point, his employer. Neither man has offered a detailed public account of what that earlier relationship meant for the 2020 allegations.
What is documented is a long track record of claims that preceded those allegations. In 2015, Johnson solicited crowdfunding on GotNews claiming inside knowledge of the location of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. In 2017, he was connected to a forged sexual harassment complaint against Senator Chuck Schumer, its language lifted verbatim from a real complaint against a different lawmaker. That same year, he brokered and personally attended a London meeting between Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher and Julian Assange to discuss a potential presidential pardon for the WikiLeaks founder.
His proximity to the current administration followed the same pattern. For roughly 20 months, Vice President JD Vance exchanged encrypted Signal messages with Johnson about Epstein’s death, UFOs, and Ukraine. In one exchange, Vance asked directly whether he believed Epstein had died by suicide. Vance’s office described Johnson as someone who “spam texted” the senator without a real relationship, a characterization that does not account for the 20-month duration or the content of Vance’s replies. In 2018, Representative Matt Gaetz brought Johnson as his State of the Union guest. Steve Bannon, per a 2021 Rolling Stone interview, once offered to introduce Johnson to Epstein, describing the financier as “both a rival and a spy.” Johnson says he declined.
As the Times of Israel reported when Johnson’s identity became public, the Mossad allegation had already spent weeks inside the Epstein-files news cycle before anyone identified its source. The answer, once it arrived, reframed the documents themselves. The question surrounding the Epstein files is not only what they say. It is who was saying it, how the FBI weighed it, and what federal investigators concluded years before the public ever saw the same material.
None of that is in the files either.
