-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, Donald Trump has made some farfetched statements over the last few months, but a stunner in the last few days was his claim that the Jeffrey Epstein matter was a ``hoax'' and a ``scam.''
Here is why the President is wrong. The figure at the center of this story was an ultra-rich, well-connected sex trafficker. He was a serial rapist of women and young girls. And for some reason, the Trump administration that claimed they would be the most transparent administration ever turned on a dime.
The President had run on a campaign with a promise to expose the Epstein files. Now, he and the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, say, nope, nothing to investigate when it comes to Epstein and sex trafficking. All these claims are just ludicrous.
I want the American people to know that is wrong. If you want to know why, just look at the latest report from our investigators that was discussed in the New York Times this morning. Somewhere in the Treasury Department, locked away in a cabinet drawer, is a big Epstein file that is full of actionable information--``follow the money''--details about his financing and operations that await investigation.
Last year, the Biden administration allowed our investigators to look at portions of the file. We did that at the Treasury Building. Here is what it says. Treasury's Epstein file details 4,725 wire transfers. Let me repeat that--4,725 wire transfers--adding up to nearly $1.1 billion flowing in and out of just one of Mr. Epstein's bank accounts. If you ask me, that is more than 4,000 potential lines of investigation right there. Hundreds of millions more flowed through other accounts. That is even a lot more to investigate.
The file shows that Mr. Epstein used multiple Russian banks, which are now under sanctions, to process payments related to sex trafficking. A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkiye, and elsewhere.
One shudders to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and young girls out of those countries and into the Epstein web of abuse.
Again, these are all potential leads the Department of Justice ought to be digging into. This is about years and years of international sex trafficking.
None of this is a hoax. None of it is a scam. I would like to say, I consider it insulting to the intelligence of the American people for the Trump administration to simply say there is nothing to investigate here.
When the Trump administration came in with a lot of fanfare about transparency and openness, I said I am going to follow up on that. So I wrote to the Attorney General, Ms. Bondi; Treasury Secretary Bessent; FBI Director Patel, and I asked them all to produce the Epstein file to the Senate Finance Committee so it could be reviewed. In fact, I made that request multiple times. The Trump commitment to transparency based on the response didn't mean a whole lot because they just refused.
Here is what one Treasury official wrote back to me:
The Department of Treasury has previously made documents available relating to the matter in response to your inquiries. Accordingly, we understand that you have the information you seek from the Treasury related to this request. We thank you for your attention to this important issue.
For anybody who is familiar with how these discussions go in Washington, DC, what I just read was code for the bureaucrats saying: You are asking for information. Go pound sand.
The Trump administration may be trying to close the books on the Epstein sex trafficking, but I want it understood, as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, where we spend a lot of time looking at where substantial sums of money are going, particularly if they may be promoting wrongdoing and helping to evade taxes, we are going to stay on this fight to hold the wealthy individuals accountable for the harm that they, clearly, were involved in, injuring the young women and others in this sex trafficking.
I am going to have more follow-up for Attorney General Bondi very quickly. As for today, if she doesn't want to do the investigating, doesn't want the DOJ to do it, let me just reinstate my original demand: Have that Treasury information given to the Senate Finance Committee and have us, on a bipartisan basis, do our work. That is what we do in important investigations.
If the Trump people believe they need additional authority to carry out the requests that I make, again, this afternoon, let me offer to help them write the bill myself. The idea that there is nothing more to investigate--not when you have 4,000 wire transfers, many of them associated with the possibility of wrongdoing and sex trafficking promoting--the idea that you have that and there is nothing to investigate when it comes to the Epstein sex trafficking operation is ridiculous.
Pam Bondi was the attorney general in the State of Florida where a lot of the Epstein crimes were committed. The Attorney General ought to know better, of all people.
I can't begin to understand the President's handling of this or why he thinks this is just going to go away. But I am here to say that our investigators have spent 3 full years looking into this. And the reason why is because we feel so strongly about the horror of sex trafficking and our commitment to root it out.
The President of the Senate is new to this body, but I am sure he has dealt with these issues before. You can't have a much bigger horror in front of you than sex trafficking abuse. So we are talking about real evil--real evil--done to women and girls by Jeffrey Epstein. And, Mr. President, nobody gets to sweep that under the rug.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source