Legal experts say that new lawsuits could reveal late financier Jeffrey Epstein's ties to banks and avoid the "embarrassing partisan gamesmanship" blocking justice for survivors and "accomplish what lawmakers had failed to do."
Two new lawsuits filed against Bank of America and the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) by an anonymous plaintiff allege that the financial institutions "illicitly enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking," The Guardian reports Monday. The suits are led by Sigrid S. McCawley, of Boies Schiller Flexner, and Brad Edwards of Edwards Henderson, both longtime representatives of Epstein victims.
Despite the outcome of the suits, Edwards asserts that the litigation could discourage future trafficking.
“The lawsuits are necessary for complete justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein – as well as for future would-be victims who will suffer from similar trafficking organizations – if our financial institutions are not held accountable for the essential role each plays, either in providing the necessary infrastructure for the illegal operation or recognizing the financial component of these crimes and putting an end to it," Edwards said in a statement.
“We have a far better chance of making a real difference than Congress, because we know the facts and history of the case and are not motivated by politics but rather by a genuine desire to make a real difference and to protect the survivors, who have already suffered tremendously," he added.
The legal move could shed more light on secrets behind Epstein and other wealthy individuals' actions.
“We approach these matters without any political agenda and thus cannot be deterred by shutdowns, protecting wealthy politically connected individuals, or the other embarrassing partisan gamesmanship you and the rest of the world have had to watch unfold recently.”
When Emmett Till’s mother lifted the veil from her son’s mutilated body in 1955, she forced America to face itself. She knew that if the nation could see what had been done to her child, it could no longer pretend innocence. That open casket was a moral explosion: it turned private grief into a public reckoning.
The same courage is needed now.
Amy Wallace, the co-writer of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, has said she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein.
She says the FBI — and, presumably, Director Kash Patel — knows the names of those men.
She says the Department of Justice — and, presumably, AG Pam Bondi (who turned a blind eye to Epstein’s crimes during the eight years she was Florida’s Attorney General while he was raping children under her nose) — knows the names of those men.
The only ones kept in the dark are the American people.
“Yes, I know who the names are. Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”
Yet the files remain sealed, and the truth sits buried under bullshit excuses about “ongoing investigations” and “legal process” that are obviously designed to protect one person: Donald Trump. Was he also raping children? Was the Miss Teen USA Pageant he owned back then also part of Epstein’s network, feeding teenage girls to predators?
Is that what House Speaker Mike Johnson is working so hard to cover up? Are they haunted by the Newsweek headline: “Epstein Victim Was Contestant in Donald Trump’s Teen Beauty Pageant”? Is that why Johnson is refusing to swear Adelita Grijalva into office?
Most recently we’ve been treated to the naked lies Patel and Bondi are apparently telling (or shrouding with legalese) about not having “Epstein’s list” at all, something both of them previously claimed existed. Did it simply vanish? Did they destroy it, after Bondi told the press that it was “sitting on my desk right now” back in February?
Virginia Giuffre fought to expose Epstein’s network of predators who were, and still are, protected both by their great wealth and the status that can confer and, now, by the Republican Party itself. Her courage cost her her life, and her death leaves behind both a tragedy and a moral demand.
Her story is not gossip. It’s unambiguous testimony about how men in power like Donald Trump shield themselves from justice. It’s the record of an old boy system that would rather bury the victims than confront the abusers.
Every institution involved in this cover-up is rotting from within. The Republican-controlled House and Senate. Trump’s Department of Justice. His toady-controlled FBI.
We’ve seen this sickness before.
The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests for decades. George W. Bush’s administration lied about torture and murder.
Corporations selling tobacco, asbestos, fossil fuels, and opioids hid reports on their deadly products and hired corrupt “scientists” and paid off mostly-Republican politicians to help them continue killing Americans and our planet for billions in profits. Trump’s administration even tried to bring back asbestos.
There’s not a family in America that wasn’t touched by this criminality and these men’s lies: the asbestos industry’s executives’ coverups killed my father, and the tobacco industry’s executives’ coverups killed my younger brother Stanley.
The formula never changes. When uncomfortable truths threaten people who hold great wealth and power, they use that power to hide the truth. The result is always the same: a deep moral infection that spreads — and often kills — until the public rises up to clean it out.
The Epstein case is not about one man. It’s about a culture of privilege that believes laws are for the poor and justice is for the powerless.
If a large group of men are named in the files as abusers of children, and if the FBI and DOJ know who they are as Virginia Giuffre alleges, then every day of silence is a crime against humanity.
Every Trump administration official who stays quiet is an accomplice. Every Republican representative or senator who hides behind “procedure” and cowers in fear of Trump joins the conspiracy.
America cannot heal by hiding its wounds. Just as Emmett Till’s mother forced the nation to look at the face of violent racism, we must now look at the faces of those men Trump and Epstein traveled with who used children as sex objects and hid behind the power their great wealth conferred.
It may be painful to see, but the truth is always painful before it’s redemptive. The cover-up must end. The files must be released. The names must be spoken.
Those who raped and trafficked children with Epstein — including Trump, if the evidence points in that direction — must face public exposure and legal punishment. They should not hold office, sit on boards, or enjoy the comforts of respectability. They should face justice.
And those who know and remain silent must be held to account as well. We can’t have one standard for the powerful and another for everyone else. A democracy that protects predators because they’re rich or politically powerful is no democracy at all.
The FBI, the Department of Justice, Republicans in Congress, and every public servant with knowledge of these crimes must decide which side of history they stand on. If they choose secrecy, they stand with the abusers. If they choose truth, they stand with the victims and with the conscience of the nation. There is no middle ground.
This is not about revenge. It’s about cleansing the moral fabric of our country. Evil thrives in silence. It feeds on secrecy. When sunlight hits corruption, it dies. The moment those names are made public, the reckoning begins. That’s how justice starts.
Let the people see what’s been done. Let them see who did it. Let them see the truth that Trump and those around him have tried so hard to bury.
Emmett Till’s mother showed us what courage looks like. Now that same courage is needed again. Until the truth is out, until the names are spoken, until justice is real, the stain will remain on us all.
Michael Wolff plans to subpoena President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in the lawsuit he filed against the first lady on Tuesday, the reporter and Trump biographer said.
A legal threat against him by Melania Trump last week represented “exactly … what a SLAPP suit is,” Wolff said, going on to define “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or intimidation suits, as weapons wielded by wealthy people saying, “We're suing you so you shut up.”
“That's against the law in New York state, to use the law for such purposes,” Wolff told the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and Michael Popok, a lawyer and host of the Legal AF podcast, on Wednesday.
“So last night, we went, we sued. We sued in court in New York, asking for a declaratory judgment, a judgment that says, ‘You can't do this.’
“And this process will give us now the right to call witnesses, subpoena power, and those witnesses might very well, will very well include Melania Trump and Donald Trump, and therefore afford me the opportunity to really have an in-depth discussion with them, under oath before a court reporter, about their relationship with … Jeffrey Epstein.”
Melania Trump’s threat to sue Wolff arose from comments he made on his Daily Beast podcast, Inside Trump’s Head, about how the first lady met her husband.
Pictures showing both Trumps with Epstein, the late financier and sex offender whose crimes and ties to powerful men are the subject of renewed and fierce attention, have long been discussed.
Wolff has spoken widely about interviews he conducted with Epstein in which Epstein’s long friendship with Donald Trump and their acrimonious falling out were discussed in depth.
Wolff has said Epstein showed him pictures of Trump in potentially embarrassing poses with young women. He also said he presumes the FBI now possesses such photos.
Epstein died in prison in 2019, when Trump was first in the White House. Authorities said the death was a suicide.
Six years on, intense speculation over the so-called “Epstein files” continues, stoked by the emergence of documents prominently including a suggestive 50th birthday poem and drawing from Trump, and by the publication of the autobiography of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim who killed herself earlier this year.
“Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had this long, long, long friendship,” Wolff told Blumenthal and Popok. “Really a joined-by-the-hip friendship. So there will be a lot of questions” in court.
Blumenthal asked: “And there may be other witnesses called as well?”
Wolff said: “Yes … anyone who might have information about their relationship, Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his circle.”
Referring to Epstein’s long-time partner, Blumenthal said: “You could call Ghislaine Maxwell, couldn’t you?”
“Oh, we certainly could,” Wolff said.
Maxwell's involvement in Epstein's affairs and links to men such as Britain's Prince Andrew are a major focus of Giuffre's memoir.
Recently, Maxwell was moved to a relatively comfortable federal facility after a controversial jailhouse interview with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who was previously Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Donald and Melania Trump vehemently deny wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. In August, the Beast withdrew a story about the Trumps and Epstein that was based on comments by Wolff.
“I'm very fond of The Daily Beast,” Wolff said, “… a young person in the office wrote an article based on the podcast that I did. And in fact incorrectly said that I said that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump … I didn’t say it and I don’t know … that he made the direct introduction.”
A spokesman for the first lady, Nick Clemens, recently said: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods. The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, ‘Melania.’”
In that book, Melania Trump says she met Donald Trump at the Kit Kat Club in New York City in September 1998. Trump was with another woman but asked Melania out anyway, she writes.
On the Legal AF podcast, Blumenthal quoted recent remarks in which Donald Trump appeared to say he was behind his wife’s legal threats, saying he said he had “done pretty well on these lawsuits lately” and had told Melania to “go forward” because “Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with Melania and I introducing but they do that. They make up stories.”
Wolff said suing Melania was “not about defamation. This is about the effort, on the part of the Trumps, to shut people up. And it's an extraordinary effort.
“I don't know of any instance in the modern age where the President of the United States or the First Lady, in this instance basically they are one and the same, have sued the media … and they have done it now repeatedly, over and over and over again and … it has worked. It has chilled everybody's sense of safety in our business.
“… This is the White House in all its power, acting against the media and me … I'm hardly the media. I'm just a single writer.”
Though Wolff said “frankly, it is frightening” to take on the Trumps, he said he felt he did not have any alternative.
“Thinking this through, ‘How do I get this to go away,’ I just couldn't figure out a way, and also, I felt, well, you know, damn it. You know, there's a responsibility here. You got to do it now.”
Faced with the expense of mounting the suit, Wolff said he would probably ask for financial support from the public.
Wolff also noted that in 2018, Donald Trump tried to stop the publication of Fire and Fury, the first of Wolff’s four books on the president. When the publisher refused to blink, Wolff noted, Trump backed down.
The "hired gun" co-writer behind the Jeffrey Epstein survivor book dropped a stunning statement, saying "I know who the names are."
Writer Amy Wallace, who helped complete Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, "Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice," told News Nation Tuesday that she spent four years co-writing the book about Giuffre’s story of surviving abuse under Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, The Daily Beast reports.
“Yes, I know who the names are. Virginia knows who the names are, but so does the FBI and so does the Department of Justice,” Wallace said. “That’s why there’s such a clamoring right now for the Epstein files to be released.”
Giuffre, who died in April by suicide at her home in Australia, describes in detail what happened during her time with Epstein and Maxwell and her demand for justice in the posthumous book.
Wallace was asked if she would release the names herself.
“I’m a hired gun, I’m a hired writer, this is not my book,” she said.
She also explained that "nobody can find" the recordings of her conversations with Giuffre, adding "so don’t break into my house.”
Congress has been pushing for the DOJ to release the Epstein files, with Democrats claiming that Republicans are keeping the government closed in order to stall a bipartisan bill that would release the full files.
Speaker Mike Johnson Tuesday told Politico that he would support a floor vote for the discharge petition.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) informed the House Judiciary Committee that he believes the FBI knows the identities of at least 20 individuals linked to the disgraced financier's sex trafficking network.
An analyst says House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is using the government shutdown to cover for President Donald Trump's fears over the Epstein files, saying there is "little doubt" that Johnson wants to silence the survivors.
Salon's Amanda Marcotte writes Monday, as the government shutdown hits its 20th day, that it's still unclear "the full extent of the information the FBI collected on Epstein and his buddies, Trump’s determination to bury the evidence shows he’s deeply worried about the truth getting out.
"There can be little doubt that Johnson knows he’s covering for a sexual abuser. This has been adjudicated twice by civil courts, with juries finding that Carroll told the truth when she said Trump sexually abused her in a department store dressing room. There is also a tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women by the genitals in a way that directly echoes Carroll’s experience."
Johnson has "has already gone to great lengths to make sure FBI files chronicling the alleged misdeeds of Epstein and his associates never see the light of day," Marcotte writes, describing some of the backlash to the #MeToo movement.
"The purpose is silencing the victims of infamous child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged fellow abusers," Marcotte writes. "Worse, it’s all done to protect President Donald Trump, a man who was already found by a civil jury in New York to have sexually abused journalist E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room."
Questions have also risen after Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked Attorney General Pam Bondi during a Senate hearing this month about “photos of President Trump with half-naked young women.” She refused to answer the question.
He has also refused to reopen the House of Representatives to swear-in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). She has said Johnson may be blocking her to prevent the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Democrats have speculated that Johnson is trying to prevent her from signing on to a discharge petition circulated by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to force a vote on releasing evidence from Epstein's sex trafficking case, and Grijalva agreed that's possible.
"Johnson has denied the charge, but his pattern of behavior is clear," Marcotte writes. "He knows that if Trump turns against him, he would likely lose the speakership. Hiding the Epstein files appears to be Johnson’s first priority, even above reopening the government so federal employees can be paid."
WASHINGTON – In a posthumously published memoir, the Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre makes an impassioned plea for the release of all files and records related to the late financier and sex offender who abused young girls and facilitated abuse by powerful men.
“I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else,” Roberts Giuffre writes.
“I yearn, too, for a world in which perpetrators face more shame than their victims do and where anyone who's been trafficked can confront their abusers when they are ready, no matter how much time has passed.
“We don't live in this world yet – I mean, seriously: Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein's houses? And why haven't they led to the prosecution of any more abusers? – but I believe we could someday.”
Excerpts published by Vanity Fair and the Guardian have concerned how Roberts Giuffre met Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, and was sexually abused by them and other powerful figures.
Roberts Giuffre’s descriptions of sex with Prince Andrew have generated headlines in the U.K.
In 2022, Roberts Giuffre reached a settlement with Andrew, reportedly worth millions of dollars. The prince did not admit wrongdoing.
The same year, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in jail on sex-trafficking charges.
The so-called Epstein files — records seized after his second arrest and death in prison in 2019 — remain the subject of fascination.
Epstein’s relationship with Donald Trump, with whom he was long close, generates intense speculation.
The president campaigned on a promise to release the Epstein files but reversed course in office. Revelations have included a sexually suggestive poem Trump contributed to Epstein’s 50th-birthday book, and reports Trump’s name appears many times in the Epstein files.
In July, Maxwell gave an unprecedented jailhouse interview to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who was previously Trump’s own lawyer. Maxwell was moved to a more comfortable prison.
Now, as House Republicans exploit the government shutdown to hold up a motion to force release of the Epstein files, many detect an attempt to shield Trump.
The author Michael Wolff, who has written four books on Trump and claims to have hours of interviews with Epstein, has said Epstein showed him a picture of Trump in a compromising position with young girls.
Wolff has said he presumes the FBI has the picture.
Trump vehemently denies wrongdoing.
Roberts Giuffre writes about Trump but does not implicate him in improper behavior.
The writer who worked on Nobody’s Girl, Amy Wallace, this week told the Washington Post Roberts Giuffre “was a huge Trump fan … she was a Trump supporter.
“There were two reasons for it: One, she’d met him. She worked at Mar-a-Lago. Her dad worked at Mar-a-Lago. She met Trump several times, and he was always very kind to her. So she had personal memories. She thought the place was beautiful. She loved working there.
“And secondly, he said he was going to release the Epstein files. He was on her side. That’s how she felt.”
Nobody’s Girl most often opts not to name men Roberts Giuffre says she was forced to have sex with. Exceptions include Prince Andrew and individuals now dead.
She writes: “You may notice that while I've named some men in this book, I have not named all the men I was trafficked to.
“Partly that is because I still don't know some of their names. Partly, too, that is because there are certain men who I fear naming.
“The man who brutally raped me toward the end of my time with Epstein and Maxwell, for example — the man whom I've called ‘the former Prime Minister’ in court documents — I know his name, and he knows what he did to me, even though when others have sought comment from him about my allegations, he has denied them.
“I fear that this man will seek to hurt me if I say his name here.
“There are other men whom I was trafficked to who have threatened me in another way: by asserting that they will use litigation to bankrupt me.
“One of those men's names has come up repeatedly in various court filings, and in response, he has told my lawyers that if I talk about him publicly, he will employ his vast resources to keep me in court for the rest of my life.
“While I have named him in sworn depositions and identified him to the FBI, I fear that if I do so again here, my family will bear the emotional and financial brunt of that decision.
“I have the same fears about another man whom I was forced to have sex with many times — a man whom I also saw having sexual contact with Epstein himself. I would love to identify him here. But this man is very wealthy and very powerful, and I fear that he, too, might engage me in expensive, life-ruining litigation.”
Roberts Giuffre acknowledges that “some readers will question my reluctance to name many of my abusers. If I am, indeed, a fighter for justice, why have I not called them out?
“My answer is simple: Because while I have been a daughter, a prisoner, a survivor, and a warrior, my most important role is that of a mother … I won't put my family at risk if I can help it. Maybe in the future I will be ready to talk about these men. But not now.”
Elsewhere, Wallace writes that Roberts Giuffre wanted the book published in the event of her death.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was hit with a stern legal threat from Arizona's attorney general for stalling a Democrat's swearing-in amid the government shutdown.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes on Tuesday threatened legal action and accused Johnson of dragging his feet on seating Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, Politico reports.
“Arizona’s right to a full delegation, and the right of the residents of CD 7 to representation from the person they recently voted for, are not up for debate and may not be delayed or used as leverage in negotiations about unrelated legislation,” Mayes writes in the letter.
Mayes, a Democrat, indicates that Johnson and Republicans are “trying to use Arizona’s constitutional right to representation in the House as a bargaining chip” and that her office would explore “every option open to us, including litigation."
Grijalva, who is the daughter of longtime late Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died after battling cancer, won the race in late September to succeed him. Her victory has further narrowed the gap for the Republican majority in the House.
Democrats have argued that Johnson and other GOP leaders are continuing the government shutdown to avoid a vote to release files in the investigation of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Grijalva would be the final vote to force the legislation to begin.
It was his second time this month, he noted, and added, “I need something to wash out my mouth.” But in truth, the issue at hand, which is access to health care, is no laughing matter.
Greene’s latest defection from the MAGA cult of loyalty for which she has been a leading figure popped up in an exclusive interview with CNN in which she didn’t beat around the bush concerning the effect of the House-passed budget bill that, due to not reauthorizing Affordable Care Act subsidies, has caused the shutdown of the federal government.
“Everybody is just getting destroyed” Greene told reporters. “This cliff is coming for millions and millions of Americans where their health insurance premiums are about to skyrocket. Republicans, you have no solutions. You haven’t come up with a new plan in place, and we’re not even talking about it, and it is hurting so many people.”
Greene’s concerns are at odds with the narrative the GOP is trying to spin on the shutdown — namely that it’s all the fault of Senate Democrats. Instead, Greene says the health care crisis now facing millions of Americans, including her kids and constituents, is a direct threat to Republicans in the polls and voting booths.
It’s worth noting Greene is also one of four Republican House members who signed the discharge petition to force the release of the Epstein files, telling The Hill: “I think when it comes to women being raped, especially when they were 14 years old, that’s pretty black and white.”
Moreover, she said Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to keep the House shut down was “wrong” and they should reconvene to take care of the vast spectrum of Congressional business.
For his part, Johnson doesn’t want to reconvene the House due to the recent election of a Democrat who, when sworn in, will provide the final signature to force Johnson to deal with the “Epstein bomb”.
Like Greene, Buttrey noted that health care was critical and Republicans had no other plan:
“We have 10 years’ worth of data that shows that the program we designed is working and working well. There’s no need to change it, it’s a savings to our budget, it is providing help for people all across the state, it’s helping save our rural health care facilities. Why would you want to change that or come up with another plan?”
It’s fair to say the GOP tends to “keep its soldiers in line” when it comes to supporting or opposing leadership positions. Yet, just as Greene defied Johnson on Medicare funding and Donald Trump on the Epstein files, Buttrey and his nine “rebels” defied their own leadership and governor to support Medicaid expansion.
None of this spells the end of MAGA, of course. But it shows that when it comes down to the critical issues that affect the citizens of our nation and state, party affiliation is not and should not be the determining factor — especially when it comes to taking care of each other.
George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.
Early in 2024, during the Biden administration, Sen. Mike Crapo, (R-ID), had a chance to provide the world with financial information about disgraced sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
It only recently became known that Crapo was asked to join the senior Democrat on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in a subpoena for the Epstein material held by the Treasury Department. For some reason he refused.
For years, and particularly before it became standard practice to refuse to work on virtually anything with anyone in the other party, Crapo and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), now the ranking member of the Crapo-led Finance Committee, have annually teamed up to pass legislation to provide funding to rural schools. They did so again in June in an increasingly rare example of bipartisan legislating.
But bipartisanship clearly doesn’t extend to information the government, particularly the treasury department, has on Jeffrey Epstein. Crapo, it seems clear, has been stonewalling any effort to force release of material that members of his staff reviewed more than 18 months ago.
One of many mysteries about Epstein, who was in prison in 2019 awaiting trial at the time of his death, was how the guy amassed a fortune estimated at $550 million, as well as several lavish estates and a private island.
Where all that money came from and for what purpose are central questions in understanding Epstein’s crimes. Wyden has been on the case for months. When he asked Crapo to help him, Crapo refused.
After the New York Times recently reported that JP Morgan Chase, “arguably the world’s most prestigious bank,” had long treated Epstein as a “treasured client,” while essentially ignoring mounting questions about the vast sums of money flowing into and out of his accounts, Wyden insisted the bank provide information. The Oregon senator demanded an explanation as to why the bank continued to cover up Epstein’s “suspicious transactions for six years after firing him as a client.”
Earlier Wyden introduced legislation that would compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett to turn over his department’s Epstein record, while Crapo voted against a separate effort to compel release of Epstein documents.
But before Wyden introduced his Epstein legislation a curious thing happened, way back in February 2024, while Joe Biden was still president. As the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported earlier this month:
“For several hours on Valentine’s Day in 2024, staff from Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden’s office and the Senate Finance Committee sat in a room in the U.S. Treasury Department reviewing, thousands of suspicious financial transactions made by deceased and disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The transactions totaled more than $1 billion and included payments to women from eastern European countries where many of Epstein’s alleged victims are from. Along with Wyden’s team, staff from the offices of Republican Sens. Mike Crapo of Idaho and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee reviewed the documents, according to Wyden. Spokespersons for Crapo and Blackburn did not respond to requests for comment from the Capital Chronicle.
The Senate staffers we allowed to look at document and take notes but not allowed to make copies.
“And because you can’t take that stuff out of the room,” Wyden said, “I asked, particularly, if the Republicans would be willing to join me in a subpoena that would get the rest of the information that was crucial, and they wouldn’t do that. And that was during the Biden years.”
In a Sept. 2, 2025, letter to Bessent, the Treasury secretary, Wyden elaborated on one document his staff and Crapo’s reviewed in 2024.
“One of the documents,” Wyden wrote, “indicates that between 2003 and 2019, there were more than 4,725 wire transfers totaling $1.08 billion involving Jeffrey Epstein and his associates … These documents also contain details of hundreds of millions in payments to Epstein from Wall Street financiers, including $170 million Leon Black paid Epstein for purported tax and estate planning advice.”
Leon Black is a billionaire private equity investor. In 2023 Black reached a $62.5 million settlement with the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands that, as the Times reported, released Black “from any potential claims arising out of the territory’s three-year investigation into the sex trafficking operation” of Epstein. Black contends he did nothing wrong, but he sure did pay a lot of money to avoid further investigation of ties to Epstein.
“Furthermore,” Wyden wrote to Bessent, “records show that Epstein used correspondent accounts at multiple Russian banks, to process hundreds of millions of payments related to potential sex trafficking. Several of these Russian banks are now under U.S. sanctions and many of the women and girls Epstein targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan. These records outline specific names of women and girls, correspondent bank account numbers in Russia used to process the payments, as well as details on Epstein associates who had signatory authority over Epstein’s accounts and signed off on payments related to sex trafficking.”
So why hasn’t Mike Crapo joined Ron Wyden in a quest to get this information from the Treasury Department? Why has Crapo put on ice his committee’s oversight jurisdiction over the Treasury Department? Why wouldn’t he pursue Epstein documents while Biden was in office?
I emailed Crapo’s press office, as well as person who handles communication for the Finance Committee. No response. Nothing.
Specifically I asked:
Did Crapo’s staff review the Epstein documents?
Who specifically was involved in the review?
Why has Crapo not joined Wyden in pressing for the release of these materials?
I wanted to know — perhaps his constituents would like to know — why Crapo wasn’t demanding answers about Epstein’s finances. Opinion polls clearly indicate the American public, people in both parties, believe answers are necessary.
There are at least three plausible reasons Crapo refused when he had the chance to get Epstein information to the public.
Perhaps he thinks it’s not important.
Perhaps he thinks there is some privacy question involved, even though Epstein is long dead and his chief accomplice is in jail.
Or perhaps those records Crapo’s staff saw in 2024 get too close to someone Crapo doesn’t want to offend, a big campaign contributor or Wall Street banker or CEO.
Had Crapo agreed to that subpoena last year, we’d likely know a whole lot more about Jeffrey Epstein today.
Marc C. Johnson is a former Idaho broadcast journalist and was a top aide to Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His most recent books include "Mansfield and Dirksen; Bipartisan Giants of the Senate" and "Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party."
A former senator reacted Tuesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi's combative and stumbling responses to questions about the Jeffrey Epstein files before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, warning that "juries see that pause."
Attorney and former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace that eventually, more information would come out.
"When I was a courtroom prosecutor and I had a witness on the stand, and they looked the way she looked when he asked that question, what was flashing through her brain was her telling the FBI agents and Kash Patel to go through those records and flag Donald Trump's name," McCaskill said.
"That was what that was. And that was that pause you saw. And you know what? Juries see that pause. And the American people see that pause. And she can come back with yelling and snark and ugly all she wants. It doesn't change the fact that she lied about there not being a list of clients she's lying about," she added.
Bondi refused to answer questions about the Epstein case.
"There nothing being in that file that is important to the victims of these crimes," McCaskill said. "And I do think they're going to be found out. And by the way, you know, all the stuff they're doing right now, I mean, they're prosecuting Comey for lying in front of the Senate. I hope she tries that shirt on and likes how it fits."
