A once-prominent American statesman faces fallout from the Epstein files

WASHINGTON — For years, American statesman George J. Mitchell has been revered in Northern Ireland for negotiating a peace agreement that brought an end to the decades-long Troubles there.

But after the release last month of millions of files by the Justice Department, Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader, has faced a reckoning for his long association with Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in jail in 2019.

In Northern Ireland, Queen’s University Belfast took down a bronze bust of his likeness. And, separately, the US-Ireland Alliance, a nonprofit that administered a prestigious exchange scholarship in his name, announced that it would be calling the award something else.

The fallout has spread to the United States. In his native Maine, a scholarship program named for Mitchell, now 92, is considering a name change, and in Waterville, where Mitchell was born, parents of students at George Mitchell Elementary School have called for the building to be rebranded.

Mitchell has not been formally accused of wrongdoing or charged with any crime, and his relationship with Epstein has been documented for years. Yet the details of the Epstein-Mitchell relationship unveiled in the new document release have forced a reappraisal of Mitchell’s legacy.

A New York Times review of the Epstein files found that Mitchell’s name appears in more than 300 documents, though many of those are duplicates.

The documents chronicle flight logs and invitations from Epstein to attend meetings and events, as well as phone and email messages passed between the two men from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s.

A spokesperson for Mitchell, who has been in declining health in recent years, said Thursday that Mitchell denied any knowledge of inappropriate behavior by Epstein, who was accused of sexually abusing underage victims and was convicted of sex crimes in Florida in 2008.

The spokesperson, Andrew Bourke, said Mitchell “learned of Epstein’s criminal activity only through media reports related to Epstein’s Florida prosecution.”

“To the best of Senator Mitchell’s recollection, during the 12-year period between Epstein’s conviction and his death, members of Epstein’s staff extended a small number of invitations to the senator, which he declined or deflected,” Bourke said. “Senator Mitchell reiterates unequivocally that he never met, spoke with, or had any contact of any kind with any minors. Senator Mitchell profoundly regrets his association with Jeffrey Epstein and condemns, without reservation, the horrific harm Epstein inflicted on so many women.”

Mitchell spent 14 years in the Senate before becoming a Democratic foreign policy éminence grise, serving as special envoy to Northern Ireland for President Bill Clinton and to the Middle East under President Barack Obama. In between, he was chancellor of the Belfast university that this month took down his bust and also stripped his name from its Mitchell Research Institute.

Mitchell and Epstein first met in a Washington airport, according to a handwritten note from Mitchell that was published in a 50th birthday celebration book for Epstein in 2003. (The book also included submissions attributed to President Donald Trump, Clinton, billionaire investor Leon Black and others.)

“The beginning of a new year is an appropriate time to count our blessings,” Mitchell wrote in the same birthday note. “Among mine is your friendship.”

Epstein, in turn, described Mitchell as “a very very close friend” in an email to Paul Morris, who handled his accounts at Deutsche Bank, in 2013. To Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ports boss, Epstein wrote that Mitchell was “my very close friend.” And in the years after Epstein registered as a sex offender in 2009, he was constantly proposing that Mitchell participate in panels or social events, from a Yom Kippur break-fast dinner to a panel discussion with Mike Tyson.

Alan Dershowitz, who was one of Epstein’s lawyers, said in a 2015 deposition that bedrooms in Epstein’s New York City town house “were assigned to people like Senator George Mitchell” who would stay there overnight.

A few of the files described claims that Mitchell had sex with people in Epstein’s orbit — which Mitchell has denied.

In one, a woman who matches the description of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, told federal investigators in a 2016 deposition that she had been instructed by Epstein to have sex with Mitchell. The Times found nothing in the files corroborating the account from Giuffre, who died by suicide last year at her farm in Australia.

In 2019, Mitchell said, “I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre.”

Another of the documents described the unverified account of a separate woman who said she had sex with Mitchell, but the files contained no corroborating information.

While Mitchell’s name appears at least twice, in 1994 and 1995, on the passenger manifests for Epstein’s plane, the former senator remained in touch with Epstein long after the disgraced financier was released from a Florida jail in 2009.

Epstein often invited Mitchell to social events or mused to friends or his assistants about getting Mitchell to participate in something he was planning. It is unclear if, when or with whom any of those events took place.

In 2010, Epstein received an email from a redacted sender who wrote that Mitchell had returned Epstein’s phone call.

“He is in Maine and will be leaving for the Middle East in the next few days,” the sender wrote. “He would love to speak with you and gave me an updated cell #.”

In February 2013 Epstein wrote to Boris Nikolic, the science adviser for Bill Gates’ foundation, suggesting “people for bill.” The list included Mitchell, Woody Allen, Leon Panetta, “artificial intelligence guys,” the prime minister of Qatar and “victoria secret models.”

That same month, there was a calendar reminder to ask Mitchell to lunch “with JE and Bill Gates.”

On at least one occasion in November 2013, Epstein’s schedule showed a meeting with Mitchell.

Epstein received an email in 2014 with a list of three dozen names proposed for a “symposium on power.” The list included titans of industry, billionaires and the “person who came up with Texas Hold ’Em algorithm (that can beat people).” Epstein replied that the symposium should include “people who have / had great power,” including Mitchell and Tyson, the former heavyweight champion boxer who spent three years in prison after being convicted of rape charges in Indiana.

And in 2015, Mitchell responded to an email from Epstein’s assistant to decline an offer to get coffee with Epstein and Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, and Terje Rod-Larsen, a Norwegian diplomat, or to meet the next week with Epstein and Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual.

“I think I will see Ehud Barak at a conference in Aspen and in NY,” Mitchell wrote. “Best regards to Jeffrey and you.”

Epstein sought to leverage his relationship with Mitchell to reach other important people. A list of invitees to a post-Yom Kippur meal in 2010 indicates Mitchell declined to attend but includes a note reading, “Je said if senator Mitchell confirms, then invite Larry Summers and Ehud Barak and tell them both senator Mitchell will be coming.”

Federal prosecutors in New York City charged Epstein with sex trafficking in July 2019. He died in jail about a month later, and his death was ruled a suicide.

Since the latest tranche of the Epstein files was released Jan. 30, the damage to Mitchell’s reputation has been swift.

This month he resigned from the Mitchell Institute, which provides college scholarships to students from Maine. The institute’s board also said it was “an appropriate time” to consider changing its name.

But perhaps the most significant repercussions were taking place in Ireland, where he had enjoyed a reputation as a dignified statesman credited with forging a lasting peace in Northern Ireland.

In announcing the changes to the name of her organization’s exchange scholarship, Trina Vargo, founder and president of the US-Ireland Alliance, said the decision had come after “new information that has come to light as part of the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.”

Students referred to as Mitchell scholars will temporarily be known as US-Ireland Alliance Scholars until decisions have been made about the future of the program, Vargo said.