The email arrived in Jeffrey Epstein's personal Gmail account on Sunday afternoon, October 15, 2017, 21 months before he would be arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in New York. It had been forwarded from Noam Chomsky and carried a short question above his signature.
"Could you let us know whether this makes any sense? Especially about no withdrawals until '23. Impossible to live under that condition. Noam." [EFTA00988381]
Below the question was the email chain Chomsky was asking Epstein to evaluate: 6 weeks of correspondence between Chomsky, his wife Valeria, their accountants in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and a research associate at the Boston investment firm that handled his IRA distributions.
The question was about tax planning. Chomsky had taken $580,000 out of his retirement accounts in the first 9 months of 2017 ($513,000 from his own IRA and $67,000 from an inherited IRA), and none of it had been set aside for taxes. His accountants at Abrams Little-Gill Loberfeld PC were working through whether he should file as a full-year Massachusetts resident, a full-year Arizona resident, or a part-year resident in each, while the firm's lead on the file, Nick Nichols, worked out a recommendation for how to cover the year's tax liability without triggering further penalties.
Nichols's recommendation, laid out in a September letter forwarded inside the thread, was that Chomsky take no additional IRA distributions until October 23, 2023. A 6-year hold. [EFTA00988381]
The 2 sentences carrying Chomsky's objection to that hold were not composed as a reply to Nichols. They were part of the cover note Chomsky wrote to Jeffrey Epstein when he forwarded the chain.
Epstein's answer came back the same day.
"Ask for the money from thx trust." [EFTA00988381]
The Trust, and the Trusts
The answer establishes that Epstein and Chomsky shared knowledge of a specific trust from which Chomsky could draw, and suggests Epstein was familiar enough with Chomsky's financial architecture to name the right instrument in a single line. The email does not say which trust, and it does not say whether Chomsky was a beneficiary, a grantor, or both. Those facts are not in the document.
The chain contains a second reference. On September 7, 6 weeks earlier, Chomsky's CPA supervisor, Matthew Mazotas, had written to Kathleen O'Malley at Bainco International Investors in Boston: "The two trusts do not need any Q3 or Q4 estimates as they have overpayments that have been applied to 2017." [EFTA00988381]
Mazotas's reference to "the two trusts" suggests that the instrument Epstein named in his reply is one of them, though the chain does not make the mapping explicit. Neither trust is identified by name in the verified text.
The Timing
October 2017 is 9 years after Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty under the 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement to 2 Florida state charges, 8 years after he completed his 13-month work-release sentence at the Palm Beach County Stockade, and 21 months before his July 6, 2019 arrest in Teterboro on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Chomsky was 88. He was moving from MIT, where he had spent most of his career, to a new chair at the University of Arizona. The EFTA corpus records additional contact between the two men across 2015 to 2018; that material is not the subject of this piece.
The email in the EFTA corpus is not a social note. It is a tax question routed past Chomsky's accountants to Epstein on a Sunday when the CPAs had recommended a 6-year hold that Chomsky called "impossible to live under" in his cover note to Epstein. Epstein answered in one line. The line was Epstein as counselor, not Epstein as dinner companion.
What the Record Does Not Show
Whether Chomsky followed the advice, whether the money was in fact drawn from the trust, whether Epstein held any formal fiduciary role in either of the trusts referenced in the chain, and whether there were further exchanges between the two men on the tax-residency question after October 15 are questions the verified primary source does not answer.
The CPAs' correspondence shows them writing to Chomsky and Valeria only. Chomsky forwarded their output to Epstein privately, outside the accountant chain.
Several Items Remain Open
Neither trust is identified by name in the document. The record does not establish whether the October 15 advice was followed or with what amount. The Chomsky-Epstein correspondence currently indexed in the EFTA corpus begins in 2015, and a full sweep of the thread is the next step.