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Floor Speech
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, we have been looking at this for well over 3 years now, and what I would like to do with my colleague Mr. Merkley, with all of my colleagues, is make an important point. I wanted to just take stock of where things stand.
The Trump administration came in promising radical transparency on Jeffrey Epstein. Now the fact is that the Epstein files are being suppressed, and the administration is obstructing oversight from the Congress.
The President's story about his relationship with Epstein changes by the day, and that is true of his administration as well. His personal lawyer went to talk to Ms. Maxwell, and who knows what was said in that conversation.
What we do know is that Maxwell has been moved--Epstein's partner in crime--to a minimum security prison without giving any good reason as to why a child sex trafficker deserves that additional comfort.
House Republicans seem no longer interested in having Maxwell testify.
Yesterday, it was reported that a member of Donald Trump's inner circle gave a high-paying job to another close Epstein associate, a man named Darren Indyke. That sounds about as bizarre and wrong as you can get.
My colleagues and I believe it is a big mistake for the Senate to go out of session without making real progress on real transparency on the Epstein issue. There are a number of ways you can do that.
Let me say a little bit about our investigation, which began 3\1/2\ years ago, so it has been looked at by Democrats and Republicans alike. From the outset, it has been built on the fact that you have to follow the money to be at the core of this global sex trafficking operation, which, on the basis of what we have seen, has been funded lavishly.
We began by examining the financial ties between Mr. Epstein and a Wall Street titan named Leon Black. We found that Black paid Epstein $170 million over just a couple of years. He said it was ``for tax and estate planning.''
The central claim, though, is what is noteworthy. The claim was that Mr. Epstein was a financial wizard, some superstar in terms of looking at taxes and estates, and he could perform accounting miracles. It appears this kind of work for Black and others was one of Mr. Epstein's biggest sources of income.
Now, here is the catch: Epstein wasn't an accountant or a tax attorney at all. And Leon Black, who is extraordinarily well off, already employed the best tax advisers in the business. He didn't need Mr. Epstein to handle his money. Black's lawyers even told our investigators--let me just keep it brief--that Epstein's work wasn't very impressive. He made mistakes, and his work needed to be double- checked by people who were actually tax experts. But, Mr. Black was paying Mr. Epstein more than double the income of the average Fortune 500 CEO.
Mr. Black wasn't the only one paying Mr. Epstein top dollar for this so-called financial advice. That is where we have to go to follow the money.
Last year, my investigators went to the Treasury Department and reviewed thousands of bank documents related to Mr. Epstein's financing. I have spoken at length about those documents here on the Senate floor. There is a whole set of Epstein files in the possession of the Treasury Department, above and beyond the files in the possession of the Department of Justice.
So that is a key point. You have to look, if you are going to follow the money, at the Treasury Department, not just at the Department of Justice.
We have been trying to get those documents. The Trump administration has been blocking us.
We have demanded answers from the new head of the IRS about why its criminal investigators didn't look into Epstein's work for Leon Black or whether they did any investigation of Epstein at all.
We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars paid by ultrawealthy individuals to a known sex trafficker for the purpose of dodging billions in taxes. It is unthinkable that those transactions were never audited or investigated.
A deep dive on this, starting with the IRS criminal investigations operation, could have blown the lid off Epstein's cover story about being a financial genius quite some time ago. It could have helped uncover the financing behind these horrific crimes.
One last point in terms of an update. There are all kinds of pundits out there chattering about whether this is the right political issue to focus on. My message is blunt: This is not about politics. This is not about Democrats and Republicans.
I just want to make it clear, this is about whether there is going to be justice for the victims of a notorious sex trafficker who did not abuse these women and girls alone. This is about whether there is going to be accountability for the people who enabled and participated in Epstein's crimes.
The question really is, as I close: Who is the government looking out for, the rich and powerful, even those who do horrible things, or the powerless, the victims of abuse who have been neglected for too long?
Donald Trump wants this to go away without any accountability. And for him, that might be about self-preservation. But it is clear the Trump administration, based on our detailed work, doesn't want to do the right thing here. I am 3\1/2\ years into my investigation of one aspect of the Epstein story because there ought to be accountability and justice for the victims. I am here to bring my colleagues up to date on the investigation. There will be more this summer, particularly about the Treasury Department, which is sitting on thousands and thousands of Epstein documents of its own, and they shouldn't be allowed to skate on this. We are going to keep investigating. We are going to keep putting the pressure on.
This is not about blue. It is not about red. It is about doing the right thing and making sure something like this doesn't happen again.
Senator Merkley and my colleagues are doing the right thing today. I want it understood, as somebody who has led this investigation for more than 3\1/2\ years, I support them strongly.
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