A top Justice Department official currently “leading investigations” into Jeffrey Epstein was hit with accusations Thursday of holding a “very personal interest” in limiting the scope of the agency’s probe into the disgraced financier and any potential co-conspirators, The Lever reported.
That official is Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a position he was nominated for by President Donald Trump last November.
“Jay Clayton has a very personal interest in seeing the Epstein story as a cabined-off story involving a mysterious ‘who could have ever known it’ villain, rather than the story of interconnected immoral elites it appears to be to impartial people,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of Revolving Door Project, a government watchdog group, speaking with The Lever.
“That’s a really paralyzing bias to bring to the role of prosecutor. We should want professional skeptics to serve our prosecutors, not the credulous.”
Accusations of Clayton harboring a “personal interest” in narrowing the scope of the probe into Epstein stem from a series of newly released emails from the DOJ that revealed communications between Epstein and leadership at the asset management firm Apollo Global Management, communications that took place as recently as 2016, nearly a decade after Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor.
And, according to financial disclosures, Clayton continues to hold somewhere between $1.5 million and $6 million in Apollo holdings, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in stocks from banks currently being investigated for potentially facilitating “suspicious financial transactions tied to sex trafficking crimes committed by Epstein.”
Those investments, litigation expert Chris Tobe alleged, created a “clear conflict of interest” for the prosecutor, and to such an extent that he should resign, Tobe told The Lever.
“There just seems to be too many conflicts here,” he said.
