WASHINGTON — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced this month that the Justice Department wouldn’t release any more information about its investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The announcement set off a monster backlash among some of President Donald Trump’s supporters and even prompted a few Republicans in Congress to try to force Bondi to release the material.
But the Justice Department isn’t the only part of the federal government with information on Epstein, a serial sexual predator and former friend of Trump’s.
According to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Treasury Department, which oversees taxes and investigates financial crimes, has thousands of records reflecting some of the millions of dollars funneled to Epstein, as well as several suspicious activity reports filed by banks handling the money.
Treasury officials during the administration of President Joe Biden let Wyden’s staff inspect their files. He said they uncovered more than 7,000 Epstein wire transfers possibly relating to his underage sex trafficking operation.
“There has been a concerted effort by the Trump administration to play down that these important records that we have worked with for more than three years are at the Treasury Department,” Wyden told HuffPost.
Wire transfers and suspicious activity reports are the same sorts of material Republicans used to build their impeachment case against Biden, though they ultimately failed to show he was as involved in his son’s businesses as they’d claimed. Suspicious activity reports aren’t necessarily indications of crime.
Wyden has called for the Trump administration to hand over the material, which his staff was allowed to see but not copy or remove from the Treasury Department. On Wednesday, Wyden also asked IRS commissioner Billy Long for records of any Epstein audits or other efforts to investigate the “tax planning” services he allegedly provided to other wealthy people from 2012 to 2017, after he’d served jail time on state prostitution charges but before he was indicted by the federal government in 2019.
“It is unthinkable that transactions amounting to tens of millions of dollars paid to a known criminal for the purpose of helping a mega-wealthy individual dodge billions in taxes were never audited or investigated,” Wyden said in a letter to the IRS commissioner. “When Americans think the system is rigged, this is the kind of abuse they think about.”
A spokesperson for the Treasury Department called Wyden’s letter politically motivated.
“Despite Senator Wyden’s fantasies, there are no hidden files at Treasury,” the spokesperson said in an email to HuffPost. “The fact that Senator Wyden never asked Joe Biden or Merrick Garland to address this matter shows this is pathetic political theater and a complete joke.”
Wyden first revealed earlier this month that his staff had uncovered more than $1 billion in payments to Epstein that were flagged as suspicious by banks only after his second arrest in 2019.
Epstein’s 2019 suicide in a federal prison launched a wave of conspiracy theories that he’d been murdered by former clients worried he’d reveal their secret participation in his sex trafficking schemes. Trump’s allies fueled the speculation, and Bondi and other officials in Trump’s administration said they would release the files — only to reverse course this month and say that actually, there was nothing else to release.
Trump said this week he parted ways with Epstein after Epstein hired staff away from his Mar-a-Lago club, though it’s not clear exactly when their friendship soured. Trump’s name is reportedly mentioned multiple times in the Justice Department’s Epstein files.
“He stole people that worked for me,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ And he did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out and that was it.”