Cookies Connection To Epstein
This story isn’t about a single email or a single brand—it’s about overlapping systems: political access, capital markets, and global brand licensing. InterCure sits at the center, built as a vertically integrated operator in Israel and extended outward through partnerships and listings. The involvement of Ehud Barak and documented communication with Jeffrey Epstein places the company—at least in its early phase—inside elite financial and political networks.
At the same time, InterCure secured licensing relationships with global brands like Cookies and Binske while scaling its own house platform, Canndoc. That combination—political proximity, capital access, and brand aggregation—is where the implications start to stack.
InterCure & You
InterCure Ltd. is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: INCR) headquartered in Israel, operating through its main subsidiary, Canndoc. It focuses on pharmaceutical-grade medical cannabis, and is the leading, profitable, and fastest growing cannabis company outside of North America according to their site.
They’re vertically integrated—meaning they control cultivation, production, distribution, and retail channels. That matters in a market like Israel where regulation is heavy and margins get squeezed fast.
InterCure’s brand stack—clean, deliberate, and built to signal scale. You’ve got a mix of in-house labels (Canndoc variants) and licensed/global brands like Binske, Cookies, and Humbolt sitting side by side, which tells you they’re playing both manufacturer and distributor. It’s less about building a single dominant brand and more about controlling shelf space across segments.
The presence of Cookies is the headline. That’s not accidental—that’s a signal to the market that InterCure can secure premium IP and move it through regulated channels.
This isn’t a brand-first company—it’s an infrastructure play. They want to be the pipeline: cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, and retail access. Brands are interchangeable pieces that move through that system.
By locking in recognizable names while pushing their own labels underneath, they hedge risk. If one brand fades, the machine keeps running. If a partner brand hits, they capture upside without owning all the risk.
Leadership
Ehud Barak stepping into InterCure wasn’t symbolic—it was strategic. You don’t bring in a former prime minister to babysit a board; you bring him in to open doors, stabilize perception, and navigate regulatory terrain that most operators can’t even read. From 2018 through early 2025, he functioned as a geopolitical asset as much as a corporate chairman, helping position InterCure as a legitimate, export-capable medical operator rather than a speculative play.
His presence mattered most outside Israel—Europe, capital markets, and institutional credibility. That’s where a figure like Barak shifts conversations from “emerging sector risk” to “state-aligned medical infrastructure.”
During Barak’s tenure, InterCure didn’t just grow—it professionalized. The company scaled Canndoc into one of Israel’s dominant licensed producers while expanding into pharmacy distribution and international exports. The Nasdaq listing wasn’t just a liquidity event; it was a signal that the company could operate under U.S. capital market scrutiny.
By February 2025, the job had changed. InterCure had already crossed the credibility gap—Nasdaq listing, international footprint, operational scale. At that point, the company needed executional leadership more than geopolitical signaling, which is where CEO Alexander Rabinovich stepping into the chairman role makes sense.
The Barak–Epstein Connection
Transactional emails between Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein from October 2018. It reads like coordination across three lanes: legal contact, a potential investor, and scheduling a meeting. There’s no narrative, just movement—who called the lawyer, who’s looking to invest, when they’ll meet next.
The emails show direct communication between Barak and Epstein in 2018, including references to legal coordination and investor interest tied to InterCure’s pre-Nasdaq positioning. What they do not show is deal structure, ownership stakes, or formal roles for Epstein within the company.
That distinction matters. Presence in communication ≠ operational control. But it does confirm that InterCure’s early capital and advisory environment included individuals operating at the highest—and in Epstein’s case, most controversial—levels of global finance.
The key line is the mention of “intention of investing in InterCure… pre-listing in NASDAQ.” That’s early-stage capital formation—raising money before a public listing, where valuations are lower and upside is higher. It shows InterCure was already positioning itself for U.S. capital markets in 2018, well before broader global expansion.
The mention of Benny Shabtay (Shabtai), a longtime New York entrepreneur with a leadership background in the jewelry and watch business. As the president and CEO of Di Modolo International since 2001, suggests a potential private investor being brought into the deal flow. This is how pre-IPO rounds often move—tight networks, informal signals of intent before anything formal hits paper.
Heavies
Benny Shabtai isn’t just a passive investor type—he sits inside overlapping ecosystems of philanthropy, elite networking, and capital access. His involvement with Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) and the Yale-based Shabtai Society places him in circles where business, politics, and influence converge routinely.
The Shabtai Society itself functions less like a campus club and more like a long-term relationship engine—students, alumni, policymakers, and financiers cycling through the same room over decades. That’s where deals don’t get signed—but they get seeded.
When you stack this together—Barak, Shabtai, Epstein-adjacent communication, FIDF networks, Yale society pipelines—you’re looking at a concentrated influence model, not a typical operator story.
That doesn’t automatically imply wrongdoing. But it does imply access to capital is not always democratized—it’s sometimes relationship-driven
