In December 2006, Jeffrey Epstein was the target of a criminal investigation that the FBI had code named “Operation Leap Year.” A 14-year-old girl claimed that Epstein had sexually assaulted her. Palm Beach police took the case to the FBI because they discovered that he had raped and sexually molested more girls — and they suspected that his crimes went beyond Palm Beach and even Florida.

But Epstein apparently wasn’t worried about being under the FBI’s microscope.

His sex crimes continued throughout the federal probe, in 2006 through 2008, as he used recruiters — many of them women — to help find girls and young women to satisfy his sexual appetite, emails and photographs show.

Images released Thursday from the House Oversight Committee included passports, a visa and other identification cards from seven countries: Russia, Italy, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Ukraine, Morocco and Lithuania. All the profile pictures, names and other identifying information were blacked out, but many of them indicate they were female IDs.

Epstein’s emails — some released by the Oversight Committee, others obtained by the Miami Herald and not previously reported — provide more evidence of Epstein’s global sex trafficking network. The extent and scope of that network, and who helped him, is still not fully understood.

But the new materials, combined with other evidence previously reported by the Herald, show that Epstein was trafficking girls and women both from the U.S. to other countries — and was also luring girls and women from foreign countries to the United States.

Image of a passport, with redactions, produced by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein and released on Dec. 18 by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. House Oversight Committee

Most of the emails recently obtained by the Herald were written in 2006, right around the time he was first under investigation by the FBI.

The new photographs released Thursday are part of 95,000 images obtained by the House Committee as part of its current probe into Epstein’s crimes.

Their release comes just one day before the Justice Department, separately, is required to finally unseal all the government’s files on the sex trafficker and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The activity comes nearly 20 years after federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida cut a remarkably lenient plea deal with Epstein that allowed him to avoid a lengthy prison sentence and plead guilty to two minor state charges to settle allegations that he had sexually abused dozens of teenage girls.

In 2018, the Herald wrote an investigation into the case that raised questions about whether the government concealed the seriousness of Epstein’s crimes. Among the revelations in the story was that the FBI never obtained Epstein’s computers.

Had the FBI examined his emails in 2007, they would have been able to gather evidence about who was helping him and how he was using the modeling business in particular as a front or his sex trafficking. Emails show that his top recruiter, Jean-Luc Brunel, was constantly on the prowl for new women, and he had a long history of sexual assault involving models. French authorities said he committed suicide in prison in 2022.

But there were others who were also sending him missives, at least one from Russia, often with female photos attached, with the age, weight and measurements for new prospects they were offering to Epstein. Sometimes they referred to the girls as potential “assistants,” or young coeds whom he could help with their education or careers.

In July 2006, for example, a woman emailed Epstein offering him a 19-year-old Russian student, who grew up in New York and attended a nearby college. She was an aspiring model and actress.

“She is not a big girl but a little curvy (5’8’’; 130lbs), pretty face, long brown hair, hazel eyes...” the woman wrote.

“she is too big, however if you think it important I can do it one time in the afternoon, tell her no nail polish,” Epstein responded.

Just days later, Epstein exchanged several emails with Brunel, who founded MC2 Model Management with funding from Epstein. Epstein directed him to put a woman on MC2’s payroll for $50,000 a year.

“I can call her. What should I tell her? Do you want her to scout?” Brunel wrote back.

“Start salary as soon as possible,” Epstein replied, ignoring the question about scouting.

In December 2006, yet another woman in Brazil emailed Epstein after he inquired whether she had any friends for him in Sao Paulo. “I don’t have any friends you would like,” she replied. “They are older. But if you come to Taipei, I have lots of friends there!”

The Oversight Committee also released an image of an undated text that similarly offers Epstein some new “girls.”

The House Oversight Committee released a text thread discussing recruiting girls. House Oversight Committee

“I have a friend scout she sent me some girls today,” the recruiter wrote. “But she is asking $1,000 per girl.”

It’s not clear to whom she was writing, but she adds: “I will send you girls now. Maybe someone will be good for J?” She then gives the name, age, height, measurements and weight of a woman, who is 18 and from Russia.

Another recruiter, from Russia, said she had a friend from Estonia who studies art history in college and works as a waitress. In another, she describes a “skinny, about 5.7 or 5-8,” 19-year-old from Virginia who is in New York modeling for the summer.

The 68 photos released by the Oversight Committee Thursday also include several photo closeups of words scribbled on a back, foot, hip and a woman’s chest. It’s unclear if the photos are of the same woman.

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock,” was written on a woman’s foot. The quote is from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, “Lolita,” whose protagonist is a French literature professor who writes about his obsession with a 12-year-old girl whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather.

Epstein often described the book as his favorite novel and asked many of his victims to read it. One of his private planes was also nicknamed in the media as “the Lolita Express.”

The Committee’s tranche included more photos of powerful men, including former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, director Woody Allen, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, author Noam Chomsky, and New York Times columnist David Brooks. None of the photos are dated or provide the context in which they were taken, but some of them appear to have been taken at gatherings. None of the photos implicate the men in any wrongdoing.

There is also a photo of Epstein’s 2019 passport, indicating that there was a notice on his passport showing that he was a sex offender. At the same time, in another photo, Epstein is pictured smiling and posing with an unidentified agent from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol — the same agency that was supposed to be monitoring Epstein when he arrived in the U.S. by one of his private planes.

Victims have previously told the Herald that agents rarely, if ever, checked their passports when they arrived at the airport in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned a private island that can only be accessed by boat or helicopter. A number of Epstein survivors say they were sexually abused and raped on Epstein’s island, known as Little St. James.

In August 2019, after he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges, Epstein died in his prison cell, in what was ruled a suicide.

Victims have alleged that the clients they were trafficked to internationally were high profile men — even foreign royalty or heads of state. Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked by Epstein from 2000 to 2002, said in lawsuits and her memoir that she was ordered to have sex with former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in London, when she was 17 and traveling internationally with Epstein and Maxwell.

Mountbatten-Windsor has denied the allegations.

“When we get home you are to do for him what you do for Jeffrey,” she recalled Maxwell telling her in 2001, after introducing her to the former prince. “I knew better than to question her orders. That empty feeling descended upon me again. More and more, it felt like my default state,” Giuffre wrote in her memoir, published this October. Giuffre died by suicide in April.

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