Trump’s FBI issued ‘stand down’ order on Epstein probe just days after arrest: report

A bombshell report revealed Monday that under the first Trump administration, the FBI appeared to have issued a “stand down” order to New York Police Department investigators regarding their criminal probe into Jeffrey Epstein, an order that came just five days after the disgraced financier’s arrest in 2019.

The existence of the supposed directive was revealed by law professor and legal scholar Ryan Goodman, who found it buried within the Justice Department's recent release of around 3.5 million files on Epstein.

“The directive applied to NYPD’s Special Victims Unit – the group specially trained and equipped to handle sex crimes and child abuse cases,” Goodman wrote in a report published Monday in Just Security, a non-partisan law and policy journal.

“At the time, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (DANY) had an ongoing investigation involving Epstein’s victims, the documents reveal, but the FBI assumed that would come to a halt as well following the Bureau’s directive.”

The relevant file is an email dated July 11, 2019, sent just five days after Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges.

“[Redacted] just called – FBI reached out to NYPD leadership already and they were told that SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us,” reads the email, of which both the sender and recipient’s names had been redacted.

In another email, this one dated Jan. 29, 2020, apparent FBI agents seem to confirm the existence of the supposed “stand down” order, with one noting that the NYPD’s investigation was likely closed after the directive was issued.

“After our arrest was public some phone calls were made amongst NYPD brass and I'm pretty sure there investigation was closed and differed to us,” the email reads, again with both the recipient and senders’ names redacted. “I'm not totally sure of DANY's involvement into that investigation or if they ever stopped. Our assumption was obviously that they closed anything they had after his death.”

The revelation that the NYPD may have been ordered to halt its investigation into Epstein comes just four days after the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office revealed last Thursday that its own investigation into Epstein – with New Mexico being home to Epstein’s now-infamous Zorro Ranch – was closed in 2019 “at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.”