Chapotraphouse

The notion that an intelligence agency could fake the death of an asset is not one of them

Assets are supposed to be disposable though. The hierarchy is case officers > handlers > assets. I think Maxwell is the handler, owning to her closer ties to intelligence through her father, while Epstein is simply an asset. The other convincing argument for this relationship is the fact that the handler is still alive while the asset has been liquidated. Epstein, like all assets who have outlived their usefulness, becomes the fall guy.

You can see this pattern in other cases. For the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh and his accomplice driver were disposable assets while John Doe 2 their handler has connections with West German intelligence. And after the bombing happened, McVeigh and the driver were left to rot while the feds tried to erase all existence of John Doe 2 like confiscating security camera footage in surrounding buildings that would've definitively proven the existence of John Doe 2. McVeigh got executed with lethal injection while John Doe 2 got flown out of the US by a pilot working for the CIA. There are levels to this.