WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 -- The morning after Super Bowl LVII, FBI Special Agent Aaron Spivack arrived at his desk in the New York Field Office and found a text file he had not placed there. The message was brief and unambiguous: "your network has been compromised."

The machine that had been accessed was not standard bureau infrastructure. It sat inside the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab, known internally as the C-20 lab, where the FBI stored digital evidence from the most sensitive child exploitation cases it handled, including the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. A foreign hacker, according to Spivack's own sworn declaration, had spent time reading through files specifically tied to that case.

That was February 13, 2023. For three yea...