The beef jerky anomaly is a pattern in the released Jeffrey Epstein correspondence that John Kiriakou has repeatedly flagged as unexplained.
The pattern
By Kiriakou’s count, a very large number of emails in the released tranches discuss beef jerky. He has given the figure as 1,300 emails on one occasion and “something like 1,500” on another.[1][2]
What makes the volume strange, in his telling, is the uniformity of the subject matter. Someone is coming over to teach them how to make beef jerky; someone has an amazing beef jerky recipe; they are going to make it, the jerky looks beautiful, they are going to freeze it, they are going to store it. “They talk about beef jerky nine ways from Sunday. The only thing they don’t talk about is eating beef jerky.”[3][4]
Kiriakou has read out examples from the correspondence, including an invitation offering a “jerky class” and a taste of a new jerky recipe from a restaurant where the sender worked — a restaurant Kiriakou notes was called Cannibal and Cooks.[5][6]
Kiriakou’s position
He treats it as one of several apparent code terms in the correspondence, alongside references to pizza and soda, and is explicit that he does not know what it means: he has read about it and heard about it but “can’t even speculate as to what it means”, calling it much harder to read than the pizza and soda terms.[7] Pressed on whether the emails are about children or about people, his answer is “we don’t know.”[4]
He places the anomaly inside a broader argument about the incompleteness of the release: there are, he says, “more questions now after the release of these three million pages than we had before we knew anything at all.”[8]